The recent successful film adaptations of Howard's End, A Room With a View, and Where Angels Fear to Tread have helped to inspire a new critical and popular readership for E. M. Forster. With an introduction by Louis Auchincloss, these three classic novels are accompanied here by The Longest Journey and the short stories from his admired first collection, The Celestial Omnibus.
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.
17 July 2009 - I am giving Where Angels Fear to Tread 4 stars, even though I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. However, it was well written, and I figure any book that makes me think this much deserves 4 stars.
Just so you don't think I am that fast of a reader, out of this collection, there was only one novel that I hadn't read, along with his short stories. The novel was "The Longest Journey" and it was a joy to read Forster again. His short stories were really great as well.