Collected Works, Including a Room with a View, Howards End, the Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread and the Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories

by E.M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879 - 1970) is best known for his beautiful novels - ironic with delicious plots, highlighting the hypocrisy and discrimination in early 20th-century British society. This volume brings together five of Forster's most notable works: A Room with a View. This is the ultimate coming of age novel, written so beautifully that no other novel of its type ever needed to be written. The young English middle-class girl, Lucy Honeychurch is wooed by two men, George Emerson and Cecil Vyse. One represents social acceptance, the other love and the whole stories is intertwined with irony. The novel takes us through the transformation of Lucy from innocent to wounded to unlikeable to unemotional and then to passionate. How Forster does this is a mystery and it the novel is pure magic. Howards End. This novel is a work of art. Howard's End is a country home but it represents England, the fate of both being uncertain due to extreme upheavals in social and economic changes in the post Victorian era. Forster is profound and witty in equal measure and he loves each of his characters and treats them with compassion as they fall helplessly towards the inevitable tragic end. The Longest Journey. This novel is the one Forster said he was most pleased to have written. It is a novel that grapples with some deep philosophical questions: What is the right way to live and what the wrong? Can anyone ever tell us how to live our life? Forster once again plunges us into a world of conventions and fakery, he pulls off the veneer of politeness and shows the rottenness inside. It challenges us never to stop questioning and to never be complacent with our morality. Where Angels Fear to Tread. This was Forster's first novel and is short but remarkably mature. The story is based around Lilia Herriton who takes a trip to Italy, gets married and is preganant with her first child before her family have a chance to stop it. Sadly, Lilia dies in childbirth and so the family see fit to try to recuse the child from being brought up as an Italian, preferring him to be groomed to be an English gentleman. It is a comedy of manners exposing the English superiority complex and obsession with class. The Celestial Omnibus and other Stories. A series of short stories exposing once again Forster's genius and wit.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Collections, Romance, Ebooks

808 pages, Hardcover

First published July 13, 2011

About the author

Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.

Reviews

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful author, I loved all his books and would surely re-read any of them with pleasure.

[Amy Stapleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't actually gotten through all the novels, but finished Room with a View. I found it to be a very enjoyable read, despite the fact that really not much happens. If you read the synopsis you'd think the story has got to be stuffy and boring. But there's a real flair for character observation on the part of omniscient narrator. If I had to classify the narrator's persona, it would be a skeptic of the individual, but an optimist of human kind as a whole. The only suspense in the whole book concerns what will happen to Lucy. But she's such an interesting character, at such a vulnerable and pivotal point in her life, that we can't help but wonder which road she'll take. I really appreciate the fact that even the "villains" in the story are given deeper and better selves, and nobody comes off looking really bad. There's hope for all of us, it seems!

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Angels…” is marvelous; “A Room…” almost bests the famous film adaptation and the others are pretty entertaining, with the exception of “The Longest Journey,” which seemed a bit tedious and overwrought. “The Road to Colonus” perhaps in it’s brevity, provides a sweet, ironic ‘bookend’ to the collection. Forster’s fame is shown here to be deserved and hard-won.

[T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed each of the novels individually; the collection included short stories, most of which were supernatural, and not as good as the novels.

[Mark Tedesco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love his full length novels. His short stories are a mixed bag; some I liked, others left me scratching my head.

[Jaq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very good stories, that have stood the test of time.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I attained this collection mainly because of The Machine Stops which one of my absolute favourites & is a timeless warning about humanity’s relationship with technology. The other short stories were not as good though one about people racing each was an interesting allegory.