EMForster&s delightfully satiric comedy of manners A Room with a View is beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range & You love the boy body & soul plainly directly as he loves you & Lucy has her rigid middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte & finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Pertolini flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish the Cockney Signora curious Mr Emerson & most of all his passionate son George Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy & the repressed morals of Victorian England personified in her terminally dull fiance Cecil Vyse Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?A Room with a View is a sunny brilliantly witty comedy of manners & He says & even more implies things that no other novelist does & we can go on reading Forster indefinitely& The Times&I loved it My first intimation of the possibilities of fiction& Zadie Smith Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879 He studied at King&s College Cambridge 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) & Howard&s End (1910) An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heuruse & the James Tait Black Memorial Prize He last novel Maurice was published posthumously in 1971 He also published two volumes of short stories & a number of non-fiction books E M Forster died in 1970