7th November

In November 1915 he was thinking about D.H. Lawrence, and censorship. He wrote urgently to Henry John Newbolt, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, with the news that The Rainbow had been 'confiscated by the authorities’. He hoped that Newbolt might join the debate against censorship, because 'the right to literary expression is as great in war as it was ever in peace’. He added a postscript: 'You’ll probably dislike The Rainbow – I make no appeal on that ground. But it represents over a year’s hard and sincere work, I know.’ (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 7 November 1915)


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