contrasts—in values, social class and cultural perspectives. Romantic relationships lead to conventional happiness in the delightful social comedy A Room with a View, and to unexpected scandal in the richer, deeply moving novel Howards End.   Howards End, which rivals A Passage to India 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.   A Room with a View 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.   Quintessentially British, these two novels have become twentieth-century classics. With an introduction and bibliography by Benjamin DeMott.

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