Free A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster by Wendy Moffat

colleague’s list included “Falstaffian, shameless, affectionate, egoistic, generous, snobbish, democratic, witty, lazy, dull, worldly, academic,” to which Morgan later in life added “a bully and a liar.” Despite these shortcomings, Morgan believed, “Whatever his make up, he did manage to educate young men.”
    Browning was “the hero of a lost play by Shakespeare.” The memoirs of his colleagues and students are studded with extraordinary vignettes. “His corpulent person was consistently to be found in a state of primitive nudity,” either sporting with undergraduates in the Cam or holding impromptu office hours in his rooms
en déshabille
. He habitually chose handsome young men with indeterminate skills to be his secretaries. His student (and later Morgan’s great friend) Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson recalled finding him undressed “in his inner room, where he slept behind a screen, in the act of getting up. On one side of him was a secretary writing letters to dictation, and on the other another [boy] playing the violin.” Browning may have been unregenerate, but his younger colleague Nathaniel Wedd, always alert to hypocrisy, defended him. Wedd observed trenchantly, “Eton sacked OB for introducing the very things on which it now prides itself.”
    Inside the insular all-male world of King’s, Browning ruled. The college was virtually cloistered; the gates were locked at nine in the evening. Within this world freedom was defined in part by extravagant misogyny. There is nothing so sure to make a young man feel invincible and important as the cocoon of excluding others. The college porter is always ready to spot you the money for a cab if you should arrive late and penniless in the fog; outsiders—even, famously, Virginia Woolf—are scooted off the lawns in front of your eyes. Fewer than a tenth of the university’s students were women, who were denied degrees and were contained in two women’s colleges at the margin of the city; Browning, who marked their exams for extra money, announced that the best woman’s essay was markedly inferior to the worst of the men’s. Heprided himself on his ignorance of women. When asked if he found the Venus of Botticelli to be lifelike, Browning replied that he could not answer the question, since he had never seen a woman naked.
    In the city, too, women were curtailed in unconscionable ways. University rules superseded British common law and applied to all inhabitants. Under rules established in the Elizabethan era, university proctors were empowered to arrest women “suspected of evil” (that is, presumed to be prostitutes), hold them without notice to civil authorities or their families, and incarcerate them in a private prison known as the Spinning House. In the 1890s Cambridge was transfixed by lawsuits brought in Crown Court by two innocent young women who sued the university for false imprisonment. Jane Elsden and Daisy Hopkins lost their cases, but the publicity incited political pressure to limit the university’s power to control civil life. By the time Morgan left King’s, the Spinning House courts had been abolished by Act of Parliament.
    For Morgan it was a relief to live in a world so different from the one dominated by Lily and the Aunts. True, he was steeped in the reflexive misogyny of Edwardian culture. When discord in any relationship occurred he would believe that “as usual the women have precipitated the trouble.” But he was attuned to bigotry and aware of his own ignorance of women. In a few years he would begin to explore why the price of justifying oneself as a homosexual should be exacted in the hatred of women. In
The Longest Journey
he would show Rickie Elliot to be obtuse and discourteous when Agnes Pembroke came to visit King’s. The Schlegel sisters, two of the most complex and sympathetic female characters in any novel, would anchor
Howards End
. One New Year’s resolution in December 1904 would be to “get a less