A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985.
The Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (1998).
Edward Morgan Forster OM CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, speeches and broadcasts, as well a limited number of biographies and some pageant plays. He also co-authored the opera Billy Budd (1951). Today, he is considered one of the most successful of the Edwardian era English novelists.
Born into a comfortable middle-class family, Forster was an only child. His father died before he reached the age of two, and thereafter he was raised by his mother and a variety of other female relatives. After attending Tonbridge School he studied history and classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he met fellow future writers such as Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. He then travelled throughout Europe before publishing his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905.
Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20 separate years.