E.M. Forster: Four Novels - Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With a View, Howards End

by E.M. Forster

Synopsis
In the novels he wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, E.M. Forster captured the temperament of Englands upper-middle class and the tension of challenges to its stifling conventions. His tales of sophisticated socialites beguiled by uninhibited members of other classes and cultures, and of morally serious men and women struggling with their impulsive emotions, are among the most elegant and entertaining works of literature produced in the Edwardian era.

The four novels collected in this volumeWhere Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and Howards Endrepresent the best of Forsters early fiction. Distinguished by their wit and irony, and memorable for their sensitive character studies, they are the enduring legacy of an artist who has been hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.



Biography
A graceful writer with a keen eye for the bittersweetness bound in differences of class and culture, E. M. Forster had an abbreviated but remarkably successful career as a novelist and established himself as one of England's most insightful 20th-century writers.

Genres: Fiction, Classics

386 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1992

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

[Kathleen Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compelling read

[James Violand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here is a gifted writer's best. He records but does not judge these characters. He seems to be of the opinion that, since we are all sinners, no one should be condemned for human errors.