A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread: Introduction by Ann Pasternak Sl [Hardcover]

E. M. Forster’s beloved Italian novels, now in a single hardcover volume.

Forster’s most memorably romantic exploration of the liberating effects of Italy on the English,A Room with a Viewfollows the carefully chaperoned Lucy Honeychurch to Florence. There she meets the unconventional George Emerson and finds herself inspired by his refreshingly free spirit— which puts her in mind of “a room with a view”—to escape the claustrophobic snobbery of her guardians back in England. The wicked tragicomedyWhere Angels Fear to Treadchronicles a young English widow’s trip to Italy and its messy aftermath. When Lilia Herriton impulsively marries a penniless Italian and then dies in childbirth, her first husband’s family sets out to rescue the child from his “uncivilized” surroundings. But in ways that they can’t possibly imagine, their narrow preconceptions will be upended by the rich and varied charms of Forster’s cherished Italy.E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, and the author ofA Passage to IndiaandHowards End.

Ann Pasternak Slater is a writer and former Fellow and Tutor at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.I N T R O D U C T I O N
By Ann Pasternak Slater

Cover-ups and the Unspoken

It is 1901.

E. M. Forster, a young man of twenty-two, has just arrived in Florence, and is deeply shocked. ‘How flagrantly indecent,’ he writes to a friend, ‘are the statues in the Uffizi with their little brown paper bathing drawers.’ Even Catholic fig-leaves are preferable. Rubens is unacceptable ‘because he paints undressed people instead of naked ones’. Forster, wayward maiden aunt of the Modernists, is affronted by the cover-ups of conventional propriety.

The excessive decorum dominating the turn of the last century is barely conceivable today. It’s hardló2