E M Forster - Collected Works, Including a Room with a View, Howards End, the Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread and the Celestial Omnibus an

by E. M. Forster

Overview

Edward Morgan Forster (1879 - 1970) is best known for his beautiful novels - ironic with delicious plots, highlighting the hypocrisy and discrimination in early 20th-century British society.

This volume brings together five of Forster's most notable works:

A Room with a View.
This is the ultimate coming of age novel, written so beautifully that no other novel of its type ever needed to be written. The young English middle-class girl, Lucy Honeychurch is wooed by two men, George Emerson and Cecil Vyse. One represents social acceptance, the other love and the whole stories is intertwined with irony. The novel takes us through the transformation of Lucy from innocent to wounded to unlikeable to unemotional and then to passionate. How Forster does this is a mystery and it the novel is pure magic.

Howards End.
This novel is a work of art. Howard's End is a country home but it represents England, the fate of both being uncertain due to extreme upheavals in social and economic changes in the post Victorian era. Forster is profound and witty in equal measure and he loves each of his characters and treats them with compassion as they fall helplessly towards the inevitable tragic end.

The Longest Journey.
This novel is the one Forster said he was most pleased to have written. It is a novel that grapples with some deep philosophical questions: What is the right way to live and what the wrong? Can anyone ever tell us how to live our life? Forster once again plunges us into a world of conventions and fakery, he pulls off the veneer of politeness and shows the rottenness inside. It challenges us never to stop questioning and to never be complacent with our morality.

Where Angels Fear to Tread.
This was Forster's first novel and is short but remarkably mature. The story is based around Lilia Herriton who takes a trip to Italy, gets married and is preganant with her first child before her family have a chance to stop it. Sadly, Lilia dies in childbirth and so the family see fit to try to recuse the child from being brought up as an Italian, preferring him to be groomed to be an English gentleman. It is a comedy of manners exposing the English superiority complex and obsession with class.

The Celestial Omnibus and other Stories.
A series of short stories exposing once again Forster's genius and wit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781393734
Publisher:	Benediction Books
Publication date:	03/07/2013
Pages:	808
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 1.69(d)

About the Author

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.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

Date of Birth:

January 1, 1879

Date of Death:

June 7, 1970

Place of Birth:

London

Place of Death:

Coventry, England

Education:

B. A. in classics, King's College, Cambridge, 1900; B. A. in history, 1901; M.A., 1910