First published in 1907, The Longest Journey is the most personal of E.M. Forster's novels, and the one he was most glad to have written.

Rickie Elliot, sensitive, idealistic and gifted with a powerful imagination, misleads him-self through his conventional desire for marriage and fatherhood. Falling for the beautiful yet superficial Agnes Pembroke, he gives up his writing ambitions and becomes a schoolmaster at a minor public school in order to marry her. So begins his journey away from the philosophical ideals of his Cambridge youth and his slow descent into a hollow world of rigid conformity and moral decay.