A Room with a View and Howards End [Paperback]

Wit and intelligence are the hallmarks of these two probing portraits of the English character written by E.M. Forster. Both are stories of extreme contrasts—in values, social class and cultural perspectives. Romantic relationships lead to conventional happiness in the delightful social comedyA Room with a View, and to unexpected scandal in the richer, deeply moving novelHowards End.
 
Howards End, which rivalsA Passage to Indiaas Forster’s greatest work, makes a country house in Hertfordshire the center and the symbol for what Lionel Trilling called a class war about who would inherit England. Commerce clashes with culture, greed with gentility.
 
A Room with a Viewbrings home the stuffiness of upper-middle-class Edwardian society in a tremendously funny comedy that pairs a well-bred young lady with a lusty railway clerk and satirizes both the clergy and the English notion of respectability.
 
Quintessentially British, these two novels have become twentieth-century classics. With an introduction and bibliography by Benjamin DeMott.Edward Morgan Forsterwas born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. He declared that his life as a whole had not been dramatic, and he was unfailingly modest about his achievements. Interviewed by the BBC on his eightieth birthday, he said: ‘I have not written as much as I’d like to . . . I write for two reasons: partly to make money and partly to win the respect of people whom I respect . . . I had better add that I am quite sure I am not a great novelist.’ Eminent critics and the general public have judged otherwise and in his obituaryThe Timescalled him ‘one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time’.

He wrote six novels, four of ló&