Reading Groups

E. M. Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India with Rebecca Rukeyser

This product is currently out of stock and unavailable.

4 Sessions Sundays, 11:00 am EDT - 12:30 pm EDT July 20 to August 10, 2025

Online via Zoom

featured-images.reading-groups.2025050610

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/20, 7/27, 8/3, 8/10
Online via Zoom

In an essay entitled “I Was Wrong About E. M. Forster,” Booker Prize-winning author Julian Barnes reflects on “what a grown-up novelist Forster is; how serious his concerns; how good he is on marriage, friendship, love and hopeless desire; how well he writes about women; on the choice between art and life, art and money, taste and vulgarity; how well he understands the power of convention and the unheroic but necessary journeys a life entails; how wry and sly he can be, and yet how powerfully reflective.”

In this group, we’ll read Forster’s most famous and lauded novels—Howards End and A Passage to India—and examine their themes of class, imperialism, passion, gender, hypocrisy, prejudice, and the thin façade of English manners. We’ll pay attention to what makes Forster’s work unique, from the lucid prose to the morally ambiguous characters to the cutting social commentary, and examine the ways these novels inspired—and continue to inspire—literary fiction.

We’ll also analyze the cinematic adaptations of David Lean’s 1984 A Passage to India and Merchant Ivory’s 1992 film Howards End, and consider critiques of Forster’s work from Edward Said, Sara Suleri, Barbara Morden. Additionally, we’ll read excerpts from Forster’s own critical work.

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read through Chapter 22 of Howards End.

What to expect from this reading group: This class will be primarily conversational and participant-driven but will also include supplemental material provided by the instructor.

Reading List:

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

featured-images.reading-groups.2025050610

Led by

  • Rebecca Rukeyser

    Rebecca Rukeyser

    Rebecca Rukeyser

    Rebecca Rukeyser is the author of the novel The Seaplane on Final Approach (Doubleday USA/ Granta Books UK, 2022). Her work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Believer, Granta, the Guardian, and Zyzzyva, among others, and was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives in Germany, where she teaches creative writing at Bard College Berlin.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops
More Groups+Workshops
Groups+Workshops

Discover More Upcoming Groups + Workshops