London: Edward Arnold, 1956

8vo, pp. 301. Original blue boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Illustrated dust jacket, design by Beryl Thornborough. Offsetting to endpapers, otherwiase a near fine copy in a very good price-clipped dust jacket, rear (white) panel a little marked, small closed tears to top edge, and a large chip to head of spine affecting title.

First edition, SIGNED AND DATED ('Nov. 25th 1960) BY FORSTER, AND WITH A PREFATORY PRESENTATION INSCRIPTION IN AN UNKNOWN HAND: 'Enid Henn - In memory of a delightful afternoon -- February 2nd 1959 -- spent with [Forster's signature and date]'.

E. M. Forster [1879-1970] was an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge, getting his BA in Classics in 1900 before spending another year there studying History. He took up residence at King's in 1953.

Born into a distinguished Irish family, T.[homas] R.[ice] Henn [1901-74] graduated from St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, in 1922 with a First in Modern Languages, returning there in 1925 to teach. A fluent German speaker, he spent most of the war in the Intelligence Corps at Salisbury before returning to Cambridge to teach Anglo-Irish literature, where he published his study of Yeats, The Lonely Tower, in 1950. He was President of the College between 1951 and 1961.

T.R.Henn and his wife Enid, to whom this book is inscribed, had two children. Their son Desmond was homosexual, a fact Thomas Henn could never come to terms with; Desmond committed suicide in 1964 at the age of thirty-five. Enid wrote Desmond, a tribute to her son; it was published by Golden Head Press in 1967.

Forster's great-aunt Marianne Thornton [1797-1887] was a philanthropist, abolitionist and close associate of the Clapham Sect. She died when Forster was only eight years old, and bestowed a large legacy on him which later would give him the financial security to write. On page 289 of this book, in what appears to be the same ink as that which Forster has used to sign the front free endpaper, a line has been drawn through a sentence relating to Marianne's final resting place: ' I have hunted in the tangled churchyard of Milton [Milton Bryan] for her grave but have failed to find it.'

The pronounced offsetting to the book's endpapers suggests the prolonged housing of envelopes, now no longer present. Without their contents, the identity of the person who made a gift of the book to Enid Henn remains unknown.