Howards End ; And, A Room with a View

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 <i>A Room with a View</i>, and to unexpected scandal in the richer, deeply moving novel <i>Howards End</i>.<br> <br> <i>Howards End</i>, which rivals <i>A Passage to India</i> 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.<br> <br> <i>A Room with a View</i> 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.<br> <br> Quintessentially British, these two novels have become twentieth-century classics. With an introduction and bibliography by Benjamin DeMott.