[1] Rickie (Frederick) Elliot is a student at early twentieth century Cambridge, a university that seems like paradise to him, amongst bright if cynical companions, when he receives a visit from two friends, an engaged young woman, Agnes Pembroke, and her elder brother, Herbert.

An orphan who grew up living with cousins, he was sent to a private boarding school where he was shunned and bullied because of his lame foot, an inherited weakness, and frail body.

Rickie's ambition to be a writer, and his freedom of thought, are suppressed by the dreary regimen of teaching, and his moral sense is suffocated by the influence of his wife and brother-in-law.

He becomes a petty tyrant in the classroom, and an insensitive enforcer of school rules, though a part of him still sees and understands what he has lost, both as a writer and a man of refinement and sensitivity, since Cambridge.

He leaves to find Stephen, dear to him now because he is the child of the same beloved mother, and he attempts unsuccessfully to assume the role of a brother, for example, to get him to stop drinking.

Stephen survives, marries, and in a brief epilogue stands up to Herbert Pembroke for his right to money that is due to him with the publication of his half-brother’s book of stories, now valuable since, after his death, Frederick Elliot has become a noted author.

Though his life is cut short, he receives his vindication by coming to moral clarity at last, rejecting conventional hypocrisy, and acknowledging his bond to his brother.

The phrase "the longest journey" appears in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Epipsychidion: I never was attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor souls with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and longest journey go.

However, even in Forster's lifetime there was reassessment of the novel's quality, with literary critic Lionel Trilling calling it "...perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate of his works.

[5] Gilbert Adair wrote that the greatest weaknesses for readers is its "unrelenting intellectuality, its sublimation and even outright repression of the importance of the erotic in human relationships" and the "...not always intentional priggishness of its characters", which he saw as constituting a poignant quality.