The Longest Journey (1907) has often been regarded as the least accessible, most flawed novel published during Forster's lifetime. But it is also the novel he himself appears to have most liked. As he put it, at the beginning of the Author's Introduction which he wrote for the Oxford World's Classics edition of the book in 1960:

As with much that Forster wrote, this short passage is more complex, cunning and strange than it may first seem. Written more than 50 years after the first publication of the novel itself, it is part of a short prefatory text that, if only superficially, encourages a biographically centred reading of the novel. Elsewhere in this introductory note Forster quotes at length from his diary for 1904, for example; he emphasizes that the Cambridge of the novel is ‘his’ Cambridge of the early 1900s, that one of his characters (Mrs Failing) is based on a ‘sedulously masculine’ (lxx) uncle, that the house called Cadover is based on this same uncle's house in Northumberland, and so on. These are all details of what Forster himself referred to as the ‘surface life’ (TCD 94). But this passage from the Author's Introduction also presents us with an image of Forster-as-writer that is by no means straightforward or logical: ‘I can remember writing it [The Longest Journey]’. With perhaps a touch of madness, this formulation suggests that there are some texts one does not remember writing: Forster hereby testifies to that peculiarity of writing which indeed estranges itself from the writer, that capacity writing has for taking on a life of its own.