Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey, is an emotional bildungsroman described by the author himself as the book "I am most glad to have written." The novel follows the character of Rickie Elliot from his Cambridge days through a problematic engagement and involves compelling secondary characters such as the illegitimate half-brother Rickie never knew existed. Lionel Trilling described the novel as "Perhaps the most brilliant, the most dramatic, and the most passionate of [Forster's] works."