In November 1902 he started writing A Room With A View, with Lucy as his surrogate, in order to explore this conflict.įorster struggled with the book, and in November 1903 redrafted it, adding new characters. (This is a conflict Forster would return to in his only novel not to been adapted into a film, The Longest Journey .) In his tour of Italy, the conflict he witnessed first-hand was between the world of buttoned-up English social mores and the raw emotion of the passionate Italians. Nottingham Lace was about the conflict between the upper middle-class world of the Manchett family and the more down-to-earth, lower middle-class Trents. From this tour sprang two novels, Where Angels Fear To Tread and A Room With A View. He did not get very far before he abandoned it and prepared for a year-long tour of Italy with his formidable mother, Lily.
In Forster’s books it’s the inner life that ensures they are three-dimensional, and as contemporary as they are Edwardian.įorster started writing his first novel, Nottingham Lace, in the summer of 1901 at the age of twenty-two. In the films they are imprisoned in the two-dimensional world of costume and setting. It’s the narrator’s insight into the inner workings of the characters, and how this weaves into the plot, that makes Philip Herriton in Where Angels Fear To Tread (1905), and Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With A View (1908), both real and interesting. The film of A Room With A View scratches the surface of Forster’s genius, whereas the adaptation of Howards End is so dull it doesn’t even do that. It’s Forster’s style, and how he works with the inner life of his characters, that makes the books spellbinding.
Forster’s work I always feel like it’s necessary to first rescue it from the tight period-drama corset of the film adaptations – or the “ruthless Good Taste of Merchant-Ivory”, as Gore Vidal once aptly characterised it.
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