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A Room with a View and Howards End
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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 comedy A Room with a View, and to unexpected scandal in the richer, deeply moving novel Howards End.
Howards End, which rivals A Passage to India as 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 View brings 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.
Howards End, which rivals A Passage to India as 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 View brings 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.
449 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1,1908
This edition
- Format
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449 pages, Mass Market Paperback
- Published
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February 4, 1986 by Signet
- ISBN
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9780451521415
- ASIN
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0451521412
- Language
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English
Characters More characters
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Lucy Honeychurch
a young girl who cant decide whether to stay with convention or her passionmore...
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Charlotte Bartlett
Lucy Honeychurchs spinster cousin, a prim poor relationmore...
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George Emerson
a forthright young man staying at the same pension as Lucy Honeychurch...
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Mr. Emerson
George Emersons kindly but tactless fathermore...
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Reverend Arthur Beebe
a thoughtful clergyman moving from Tunbridge Wells to Lucy Honeychurchs church in Surreymore...
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Eleanor Lavish
a flighty bohemian woman traveling through Florence...
About the author
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Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an 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.
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.
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Community Reviews
Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
37(37%)
4 stars
25(25%)
3 stars
38(38%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
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Beautiful both.
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This is tricky, I give 'A Room with a View' a 5 star rating but 'Howards End' a 2. Also, I read the two books approximately 10 years apart. However, I found 'A Room with a View' to be a beautiful book filled with sharp observations upon society that are just as relevant today as they were when the book was written (I assume). While 'Howards End' also had some great writing and similarly acerbic observations on society, I found myself bored whilst reading it. Of course, this might have something to do with me being 19 when I read the first book and 29 when I read the second.
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Room With a View was serendipitous and the language divine
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I don’t remember if I first read this book before or after watching the Merchant/Ivory film with Helena Bonham Carter; I do remember liking both; now, almost forty years later, I have a much deeper appreciation for Forster’s writing. His sensitivity to social nuance, original characters, wit, and sensuality expressed through landscape, music, and art are captivating. I liked the combination of romance with coming of age and loved seeing conventions defied.
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Great Forster books, both. Don't miss them. Howard's End deals about what a house can mean for a family tree and about love, too. A Room with a View happens in Florence, and deals about love, too, basically. Sensitive and clever, in Forster the ambience and how many barriers conventional love had to deal with, are redundant matters. Friendship, also. The hidden homosexual Forster remained all his life did not intervene or hinder, to beautifully wrote about the society he had to bear. He was the only member of the stheticist Bloomsbury circle who belonged to the Medium, average social class. The discrete Official clerk he was, was nevertheless accepted in that upper class circle, of Virginia Woolf and the others. Only after his death, did he allowed Maurice to be published. The only one of his books to openly dealt with homosexuality. These books, among others, as Passage to India, are since the fifties considered Masterworks of the British Literature in the whole world.
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Loved the character of Lucy
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Decent and interesting if not my favorite.
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