E. M. Forster

Lucy Honeychurch, a young middle-class girl, travels with her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, to Florence where they are on holiday at an Italian pension set up specifically for vacationers from Great Britain. There Lucy meets Mr. Emerson and his son, George, whom she encounters quite unexpectedly on walks and carriage rides. George and Lucy have unsuspected, intimate talks which happen without any intention of hypothetical conclusion. George...

Selected by the Modern Library as two of the 100 best novels of all time
'To me,' D. H. Lawerence once wrote to E. M. forster, 'you are the last Englishman.' Indeed, Forster's novels offer contemporary readers clear, vibrant portraits of life in Edwardian England. Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room with a View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to Jane Austen that perhaps any other of his works....

Written in 1914 by the Nobel Prize–nominated author of Howard’s End, this intimate portrait of homosexual desire “seems as relevant as ever” (The Guardian).
 
From early adolescence to his college years at Cambridge and into professional life at his father’s firm, Maurice Hall plays the part of the conventional Englishman. All the while, he harbors a secret wish to lose himself from...