Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster)

Where Angels Fear to Tread 
E.M. Forster, 1905
160-200 pp. (varies by publisher)
 

Summary
"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's upset people from the beginning of the world."

When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are not amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby—and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! —are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

In his first novel, E. M. Forster anticipated the themes of cultural collision and the sterility of the English middle class that he would develop in A Room with a View and A Passage to India.

Where Angels Fear to Tread is an accomplished, harrowing, and malevolently funny book, in which familiar notions of vice and virtue collapse underfoot and the best intentions go mortally awry. (Summary from Random House.)

The novel was adapted to film in 1991, starring Rupert Graves, Helena Bonham Carter, Giovanni Guidelli, Judy Davis, and Helen Mirren.

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A.,
   Cambridge


Edward Morgan Forster 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.

Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.

He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.

Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.

Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:

E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).

Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.

His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)

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Book Reviews 
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

The...contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.... It is a protest against the worship of conventionalities, and especially against the conventionalities of "refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.
Guardian (UK - 8/30/1905)

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
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• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Where Angels Fear to Tread:

1. At what is Forster taking aim in this book? To whom or what is his satire directed?

2. What kind of woman is Lilia Herriton? Why have her in-laws decided to send her to Italy—and why is Carolyn Abbot chosen as her companion (chaperone?), a woman more than 10 years Lilia's junior?

3. Talk about the quotation from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, which Lilia includes in a letter back to England: "one does really feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten path." What does Lilia mean...and what does it portend?

4. Describe each of the Herritons—Mrs. Herriton, Harriet and Philip? How are they alike...and how do they differ? Why are they opposed to Lilia's marriage to Gino Carella?

5. Why does Gino marry Lilia? Is he honorable? Does he love her? Does Gino change by the end of the novel...or does your view of him change?

6. Philip is sent to Italy to try to stop the marriage. He says to Gino: She is English, you are Italian; she are accustomed to one thing, you to another." How does that dichotomy play itself out, over and over, in the novel?

7. Why does Carolyn Abbot take it upon herself to bring the Lilia and Gino's baby back to England? She becomes a spy in Italy because she suspects that the Herritons' desire to recover the baby is insincere. Is she correct?

8. What are Mrs. Herriton and Harriet primarily concerned about? Why do they want the baby? What right—legally or morally—do they have to the child?

9. Why is Philip attracted to Italy? What is it meant to suggest about him...and his commitment to English gentility?

10. What is the symbolic significance of Lucia de Lammermoor—why might Forster have selected that particular opera as part of the story? (You might want to do a little research.)

11.. Why do Philip and Carolyn soften toward Gino?

12. Carolyn puts the dilemma of the baby succinctly when she asks Philip...

Do you want the child to stop with his father, who loves him and will bring him up badly, or do you want him to come to Sawston, where no one loves him, but where he will be brought up well?

Is Carolyn's assessment of the situation correct—e.g., would Gino bring the baby up badly? Where do you think the solution lies?

13. What do you make of Philip's remark to Carolyn:

Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them.... I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed.... I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it.

14. Twice in the novel mirrors are mentioned in connection with Philip—once as a school boy, and again on the train returning to Sawston. What is the symbolic significance of Philip and the mirrors?

15. In what way is Philip at the center of the novel? Is he the story's hero? Or is Carolyn?

16. Philip says to Carolyn:

Society is invincible—to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity—nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty—into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life—the real you.

Does Philip, himself, have a "real you"? Does he live up to his own pronouncements? Does Philip have a future as an independent, deliberate being?

17. Do Carolyn and Philip have a future together as a couple?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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