E. M. Forster's delightfully satiric comedy of
manners ''A Room with a View'' is beautifully repackaged
as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'You love the
boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves
you...' Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out
for her until she visits Florence with her uptight
cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence
thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the
unconventional characters she meets at the Pension
Pertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish,
the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of
all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn
between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed
morals of Victorian England, personified in her
terminally dull fiance Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn
to follow her own heart? A ''Room with a View'' is a
sunny, brilliantly witty comedy of manners. ''He says,
and even more implies, things that no other novelist
does, and we can go on reading Forster indefinitely''.
(''The Times''). ''I loved it. My first intimation of
the possibilities of fiction''. (Zadie Smith). Edward
Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. He studied at
King's College, Cambridge.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 Heuruse and the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize. He last novel, ''Maurice,'' was
published posthumously in 1971. He also published two
volumes of short stories and a number of non-fiction
books. E. M. Forster died in 1970. |
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