8th October

In October 1916 he was thinking about sex. In a letter never actually sent to his confidante Florence Barger from Alexandria, he wrote about how -- euphemistically – he had 'parted with respectability’ for the first time. He felt no remorse, and although he acknowledged the 'physical hunger’ involved, felt that 'in this, as in every thing, one is really after intimacy, however little one realises it’. He described his wish to write about such feelings as 'this enormous torrent in me which never stops and of which the novel is only one splash’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 16 October 1916)


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