The lives of Miss Adela Quested and those around her are forever changed when she befriends a young doctor named Aziz during a trip she and her companion Mrs. Moore make to India. The unlikely friendship between Adela and Aziz eventually culminates in a disastrous expedition to the Marabar caves, during which she offends him, an action which leads to false accusations, arrests, and a litany of miscommunications. Set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s, this classic novel explores the difficulties that arise from class differences and cultural misunderstandings as well as the impact our actions have on others.

Written when he was 25, E.M. Forster’s turn-of-the-century novel contains all the essential elements of a great love story: social comedy, unavoidable mishaps, a beautiful setting, and a young man and woman at crossed purposes. One of the author’s lighter, less sardonic novels, A Room with a View features a heroine unique for her time. Overwhelmed by the snobbish advice of her English companions, Lucy Honeychurch must find an anchor of resolve within her own heart if she is ever able to truly love.

This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson-who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist-Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England, Lucy is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion.
The enduring delight of this tale of romantic intrigue is rooted in E. M. Forster’s colorful characters, including outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Written in 1908, A Room with a View is one of Forster’s earliest and most celebrated works.

Set in Edwardian England, Howards End is the portrait of a lost era, a deceptively golden time before the First World War that would change values and lifestyles forever. To illuminate these changing times, Forster throws together three vastly dissimilar classes of people: the Schlegels-Helen and Margaret-educated, compassionate and independently wealthy; the Wilcoxes-nouveau riche Empire builders; and Leonard Bast, an ambitious but struggling bank clerk. As these three groups move in and out of each other’s worlds, disasters and discoveries ensue.

The disregard of a dying woman’s bequest, a girl’s attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. The Wilcoxes, who own the estate, are a wealthy family who made their fortune in the American colonies. The Schlegel siblings–Margaret, Helen, and Tibby–are lively socialites whose spirited and active lifestyles are representative of the intellectual bourgeoisie. And the Basts are a young couple from a lower-class background who are struggling to survive. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End. Through the fate of the estate–as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it–Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.

Considered by many to be E. M. Forster’s greatest novel, Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of “telegrams and anger.” When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home-Howards End-to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve.
Written in 1910, Howards End is a symbolic exploration of the social, economic, and intellectual forces at work in England in the years preceding World War I, a time when vast social changes were occurring. In the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, Forster perfectly embodies the competing idealism and materialism of the upper classes, while the conflict over the ownership of Howards End represents the struggle for possession of the country’s future.
Forster refuses to take sides in this conflict. Instead he poses one of the book’s central questions: In a changing modern society, what should be the relation between the inner and outer life, between the world of the intellect and the world of business? Can they ever, as Forster urges, “only connect”?