Where Angels Fear to Tread

Troublesome family scenarios are E.M. Forster's forte. In his debut novel "Where Angels Fear to Tread," a relatively young English widow named Lilia Herriton goes to Italy at the advice of her deceased husband Charles's family, accompanied by her friend Caroline Abbott, and, in a quaint little town called Monteriano, falls in love with an even younger hustler named Gino Carella and plans to marry him. The news mortifies her former in-laws: How could our Lilia marry a man beneath her class, the idle son of a dentist (a profession not highly regarded by the snobs in those days), a Catholic? Philip Herriton, Lilia's ex-brother-in-law, is immediately dispatched to Monteriano to put a stop to this fiasco, but it's too late; the wedding has already happened, and Philip returns to England with Caroline. Lilia, eager to adjust her life to this poor but picturesque provincial Italian town, finds the social environment completely alien to the one to which she is accustomed in England, and even worse is the fact that Gino, whose friends are impressed that he has been able to score a rich blond Englishwoman, is revealed to be lazy and adulterous. The worst is finally realized when Lilia dies in childbirth delivering a son to Gino. Back in England, the Herritons' connection to Lilia is not so easily broken; a daughter named Irma from her first husband has been left in their care, even though Lilia had been treated with condescension by her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Harriet while she was married to Charles. Concerned with scandal, the Herritons recoil in fear when, a few months after Lilia's death, Irma receives postcards from Monteriano signed by her "little brother." Philip, his sister Harriet, and Caroline, all convinced of Gino's unsuitableness as a father, especially of a child of English blood, return to Italy to try to retrieve the baby boy. The obvious satire of cavalier Edwardian English attitudes toward Catholic Europe is only a backdrop to the more specific issue of whether the Herritons should assume custody of a baby with whom they have no legal familial relations. Caroline, who begins to sympathize with Gino Caroline means well, of course, but her presumption that Gino would necessarily bring the boy up "badly" is part of the satire.
About the Author: Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), 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". Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started before any of his others, as early as 1901, and exists in earlier forms referred to as "Lucy". The book is the story of 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 filmed by Merchant-Ivory in 1985.