A Room with a View

Description

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster '"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..." 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 Bertolini- 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 Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiance Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart? The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. A pacifist and conscientious objector during the First World War, he volunteered instead for the International Red Cross, which took him to Alexandria. During his lifetime he travelled through Europe, Egypt and India, wrote six novels, two volumes of short stories, two collections of essays, two biographies and a libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd, declined a knighthood, was made a member of the Order of Merit, and died at the age of ninety-one. Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End are also published in the Penguin English Library.