English author E. M. Forster's 1908 book A Room with a View is about a young woman living in the conservative society of Edwardian England. The story, which is set in both Italy and England, blends a love story with an amusing investigation of English society at the turn of the 20th century. In 1985, Merchant Ivory created a successful film adaptation. A Room with a View was named number 79 on The Modern Library's list of the top 100 English-language books published in the 20th century (1998). Early 1900s England's upper middle-class women are starting to live more autonomous, risk-taking lives when the book is set. In the first chapter, Miss Lucy Honeychurch travels through Italy with her overly picky spinster cousin Miss Charlotte Bartlett, who also serves as a chaperone. The women of the Pensione Bertolini in Florence are whining about their accommodations when the book opens. Despite being promised apartments with views of the River Arno, they were given ones that looked out onto a dull courtyard. Forster began writing the "Lucy novel," a book with an Italian setting, toward the end of 1902. He neglected it in 1903 and 1904 in order to focus on other tasks.
English novelist Edward Morgan Forster was born on 1 January 1879 at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London. He was the only child of Welsh architect Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster and Anglo-Irish Alice Clara "Lily" (née Whichelo). Forster tutored Syed Ross Masood, a 17-year-old Indian future Oxford student, in Latin, he fell in love in 1906. Forster worked with the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt, as a Chief Searcher (for missing personnel) during the First World War as a conscientious objector. To his close friends, Forster was open about his homosexuality, but not to the general public. During his participation in the Bloomsbury group in the 1930s and 1940s, Forster came to be associated with the British Humanist Association. In 1946, Forster was chosen to be an honorary fellow at King's College in Cambridge. In 1949, he was offered a knighthood; in 1953, he was appointed a Companion of Honor. At the age of 82, Forster completed his final short tale, Little Imber. At the Buckinghams' house in Coventry, Warwickshire, Forster died from a stroke on June 7, 1970, at the age of 91. His ashes, mixed with Buckingham's, were afterward dispersed in the crematorium's rose garden, close to Warwick University.
