Nicola Beauman

"was always to attribute depression to ill-health or, when she was much older, to the prevailing east wind. She never assumed it was a facet of her temperament or that her life could reasonably cause it."

"'s letters to Ray give a very good idea of her literary influences. These were definitely not her mother's her favorites (Hardy, ', Gissing) and Elizabeth has grown out of Dostoevsky, dislikes Dickens, finds Lawrence a 'bloody crosspatch' and thinks Katherine Mansfield moaned too much. 'It is easy to see who is behind me: Jane Austen & Chekhov & EM Forster & Virginia Woolf. ...' ... Other important writers for her were Sterne (for his relationship to the reader), Richardson and Fielding. Above all she revered Jane Austen and Turgenev."

"It’s possible, these days, to think of E. M. Forster's cultural role as the providing of stories for to make into pretty movies. For people who think that way, Nicola Beauman's new biography will be a useful corrective. Here, in a book of modest length (at last, a biography that is not longer than its subject's collected works!), is what every general reader should know about Forster's life and contacts."