A Room with a View is a romance and a social critique of Edwardian society. A young woman is chaperoned to Italy by her bitter aunt. There she meets an intriguing, but eccentric young man. Back in England she finds herself respectably engaged to a proper gentleman, but is thrown into a muddle when her young man from Italy moves to her English town. The novel celebrates the chaotic, unsure muddle of feelings over a kind of lifeless acceptance of the way things are.

A romance and a critique centering around a young Edwardian woman.

On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and Gino, a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband's family send Lilia's brother-in-law Philip to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia has already married the Italian and becomes pregnant again. While giving birth to her son, she dies. The Herritons send Philip again to Italy, this time to save the infant boy from an uncivilized life and to save the family's reputation. Not...

Three families in England at the beginning of the 20th century: the Wilcoxes, rich capitalists with a fortune made in the Colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Tibby, and Helen), whose cultural pursuits have much in common with the real-life Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, an impoverished young couple from a lower-middle-class background. The idealistically motivated, well read, highly intelligent Schlegel sisters seek to help the struggling Basts, wishing at the same time to rid the Wilcoxes of some of their deep-seated social and economic prejudices.

A traveler steps off the road and finds himself in an alternate reality. A sullen boy accidentally summons a spirit. A man gets more than he bargained for when he buys his fiancee a plot of wooded land. These six stories deal with transformations, the truth of the imagination, and the effect of the unseen on ordinary lives. By juxtaposing the Edwardian English with pagan mythology, E.M. Forster created in this collection a work of lasting strangeness and great beauty."

They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off-Philip, Harriet, Irma, Mrs. Herriton herself. Even Mrs. Theobald, squired by Mr. Kingcroft, had braved the journey from Yorkshire to bid her only daughter good-bye. Miss Abbott was likewise attended by numerous relatives, and the sight of so many people talking at once and saying such different things caused Lilia to break into ungovernable peals of laughter.

"The cow is there," said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, "She is there, the cow. There, now." "You have not proved it," said a voice. "I have proved it to myself." "I have proved to myself that she isn't," said the voice. "The cow is not there." Ansell frowned and lit another match.

A chance encounter... a murder in the Piazza Signoria ... an impulsive kiss...and Lucy Honeychurch's world is forever changed. Torn between settling for a life of acceptable convention or the calling of her true passion, Lucy epitomizes the struggle for individuality and the power and passion of love. A Room with a View is certainly E.M Forster's most romantic novel, though it also questions the repressed sexuality and closed conventions of the Edwardian society. Set in Italy and England, Forster pivots the easy flowing passion of the Italian culture against the constrictions of late...