"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote"
About this Quote
Great literature, Forster suggests, isn’t a tasteful object you admire from a safe distance; it’s a machine for moral and psychological trespass. The line hinges on a slightly unsettling idea: reading at the highest level is not self-improvement so much as self-alteration. You don’t just “relate” to a character or pick up a theme. You get pulled, almost unwillingly, toward the mind that made the thing.
The intent is polemical in a quiet Forster way. He’s arguing against reading as decoration (the cultured person collecting classics like souvenirs) and against reading as mere information. What’s “wonderful” is the intimacy: style, rhythm, and choice of detail become a kind of fingerprinting that teaches you how another consciousness prioritizes the world. Over time, you begin to want what the author wants you to notice; your attention is trained, your sympathies reorganized. That’s the subtext: literature’s power is invasive, and that invasiveness is the point.
Context matters. Forster wrote in an era anxious about mass society, nationalism, and the pressures of conformity, and his fiction obsessively tests the boundaries between private feeling and public rules. In that light, “towards the condition of the man who wrote” reads like both promise and warning. To be transformed is to risk losing the comfort of your own inherited scripts. But it’s also to gain, through imaginative contact, the one thing Forster valued most: an enlarged capacity for connection across class, custom, and fear.
The intent is polemical in a quiet Forster way. He’s arguing against reading as decoration (the cultured person collecting classics like souvenirs) and against reading as mere information. What’s “wonderful” is the intimacy: style, rhythm, and choice of detail become a kind of fingerprinting that teaches you how another consciousness prioritizes the world. Over time, you begin to want what the author wants you to notice; your attention is trained, your sympathies reorganized. That’s the subtext: literature’s power is invasive, and that invasiveness is the point.
Context matters. Forster wrote in an era anxious about mass society, nationalism, and the pressures of conformity, and his fiction obsessively tests the boundaries between private feeling and public rules. In that light, “towards the condition of the man who wrote” reads like both promise and warning. To be transformed is to risk losing the comfort of your own inherited scripts. But it’s also to gain, through imaginative contact, the one thing Forster valued most: an enlarged capacity for connection across class, custom, and fear.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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