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  • Published: 1 September 2009
  • ISBN: 9780451531384
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $14.99

A Room With A View

Penguin English Library




Wit and intelligence are the hallmarks of this probing portrait of the English character. And in this story of extreme contrasts—in values, social class, and cultural perspectives—an unconventional romantic relationship leads to conventional happiness in a delightful social comedy.
 
While touring Italy with her overbearing cousin, well-bred Lucy Honeychurch falls in love with the handsome but entirely unsuitable George Emerson, only to become engaged to the haughty Cecil Vyse. But Lucy is lured away from the conventions of upper-middle-class Edwardian society by her yearnings for the clerk she left behind. A Room with a View satirizes the English notion of respectability—and remains Forster’s most beloved novel and a twentieth-century classic.

  • Published: 1 September 2009
  • ISBN: 9780451531384
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $14.99

Other books in the series

On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster was 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 obituary The Times called him 'one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time'.

He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice, his novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross in the First World War); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.

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