26th December
In January 1905 he was thinking about ghost stories, having started to write one. In a letter to Leonard Woolf he described how in this story 'a finger promenades by itself, tip to root, caterpillar fashion, over the carpet’. Something wasn’t working, however, and Forster concluded that 'it does require a mind of extraordinary frivolity to frighten people, and I’m rather pleased to find that I can’t do it’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 1 January 1905)
