What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Forster is describing literature as a uniquely intimate medium: in reading, we do not merely receive information or entertainment, but undergo a kind of inward re-formation. “Great literature” carries the reader toward the writer’s “condition”—a blend of sensibility, moral attention, and imaginative stance—so that the reader temporarily inhabits another consciousness. The claim also implies an ethical and humanistic faith typical of Forster’s criticism: art enlarges sympathy by making private experience shareable. At the same time, the phrasing is deliberately asymmetrical (reader moves toward writer), stressing the author’s achieved vision as a standard that can elevate the reader’s inner life.