![]() Forster was, as everyone knows, gay Scott, it transpired in Hilary Spurling’s highly acclaimed biography, was at least fractionally gay despite his having lived a more or less conventional life. The most obvious bad guy in Forster’s novel is called Ronnie, while the main villain in Scott’s is called Ronald, occasionally also referred to as Ronnie. ![]() Forster’s novel was set in a fictitious town by the name of Chandrapore, and Scott’s in a town called Mayapore (Maya being a Hindu word meaning “illusion”). Was it a coincidence, then, that the novel should have as its central event – the unfounded allegation against an Indian of the rape of an English woman – the same essential situation that had been portrayed decades before in EM Forster’s classic novel, A Passage To India? This is not the only similarity, though it is the the most striking. Who was this woman? Why was she running? From what? To where? ![]() The novel, he says, was an attempt to find out where the image came from. Paul Scott claims that his Raj Quartet originated in an image that came to him one sleepless night in an Indian village, the image of a young English woman running, exhausted but game, in the dark along a road beside a wall. Four Volume Set originally published 1966-75 ![]()
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