This was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer.

Forster inherited £8,000 (equivalent to £909,502 in 2020 ) in trust from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died on 5 November 1887. Plaque and sundial at Rooks Nest, the childhood home remembered in Forster's novel Howards End.Īmong Forster's ancestors were members of the Clapham Sect, a social reform group in the Church of England.