Room with A View & Howards End

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.