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Antony Copley. A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood. Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006. xi + 397 pp.
This is not your standard scholarly monograph; neither is it a book of literary criticism, nor, for that matter, cultural studies in any conventional sense. It is a book about spiritual quests that is itself the record of a spiritual quest. To prepare for its writing, Copley went to India to look at, to reimagine, the places his three authors wrote of or about or from, and in the extracts of his diaries from that journey (not by any means his first Indian visit), which are published here as an appendix, he wonders if he can accept Vedantism, whether he can "slough off the ego for the sake of the Atman [the transcendental self]" (304), whether his life has been a detour from its true purpose, and whether he might not have pursued a monastic, a spiritual path instead of the more academic one of teacher of Modern European and Afro-Asian history. The author of biographies of Ghandi and of Rajagopalachari (an Indian political figure as well as novelist and poet who wrote in Tamil and who also translated Tamil texts into English) and of studies of sexuality and of religious conflict in France and in India, Antony Copley examines the writings and biographies of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood to answer the question of how they reconciled their sexuality and their interest in the spiritual and the mystical and, more particularly, the question of how their move to another religion and culture was a way of dealing with their homosexuality. The study has both a chronological and a thematic arc. It begins with Carpenter as both a disciple and a guru and ends with Isherwood as a vexed, yet persistent, disciple. Forster is really neither (although, at least metaphorically, he could be said to have played the role of guru for Isherwood), and indeed his Hinduism, such as it...