Published the year after
Howards End, Forster's first collection of short stories is a departure from the realism of his recent novel into the fantasy of ancient Greece and Rome, Paganism and Paradise. As he had produced four novels in quick succession since 1905, the six stories of
The Celestial Omnibus(1911) were published at a time when Forster appeared to be a prolific writer. Yet his next published book of fiction,
A Passage to India, would not appear for thirteen years.
The first inclusion is “The Story of a Panic”, which Forster rewrote after excising it late on from his second novel The Longest Journey. Unlike the novels he had published up to this point, the story is told in the first person, by a narrator holidaying in Italy with his wife. A picnic in the chestnut woods
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Citation: Childs, Peter. "The Celestial Omnibus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1310, accessed 22 November 2024.]
