Two Cheers for Democracy: A Selection: 146 (Persephone Books)

As well as novels, Forster wrote two biographies, a libretto, short stories, book reviews, literary criticism - and essays. These pieces were often about writers he admired, but many of them were about moral values, about what he believed. The originally sixty-nine essays in Two Cheers for Democracy – we have cut them down to twenty-five – date from 1925 to 1951 (an earlier volume of essays, Abinger Harvest, appeared in 1936). Hence the word 'Selection' in the subtitle of our volume: we have made our own selection because we felt that some of the essays are not particularly interesting nowadays. Our intention is to entice Persephone readers to read ‘Culture and Freedom’ or ‘What I Believe’ – and not to get bogged down in essays on William Arnold or Forrest Reid.

In the preface to Two Cheers, Henry Mance of the Financial Times writes: ‘More than seven decades after the essays were written, they chime with me – indeed, they console me.’ He concludes: ‘One of my favourite phrases in Two Cheers is that we “have, in this age of unrest, to ferry much old stuff across the river”. Whatever horrors, whatever mistakes we encounter, we don’t just draw a line and write off the past. We are only here for a short while. We have a cultural responsibility. Forster concluded of Woolf: “It is as a novelist that she will be judged. But the rest of her work must be remembered.” The same is, of course, true of Forster himself. His essays speak to us because they invite us to be ourselves. We must ferry them across the river.’