A Room with a View

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'A Room with a View' by E. M. Forster: Motifs, Symbolism and Contrasts Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect … ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success. A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian era, England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.Merchant-Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel deals with a group of British characters in two major settings: Part One and the final chapter are set in Florence, Italy, and Part Two is set mostly in a quiet part of Surrey, England. Forster's characters, like Forster himself at the time of the novel's writing, live in the time of the British Empire's zenith. With possessions in every part of the globe, the British Empire was as yet untouched by the difficulties of the two world wars. The monarch of England was also the king of Canada and the emperor of India; English citizens enjoyed the fruits of a system of exploitation and oppression that touched the far corners of the world. The remnants of Victorian sensibilities were still very much alive. Prim and proper Brits worried about refinement, the virtue of young girls, and the control

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