In the Library
Where Angels Fear to Tread
E.M. Forster, 1905
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 49k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Henry James
James sends Strether abroad to fetch home a wayward young American, and just as with Philip in Monteriano, the envoy turns out to be the one who changes.
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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Mann sends another northerner south and lets Italy undo him too, but his ruin is private and beautiful where Forster's is clumsy and shared among decent people.
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About the book
In a hill-town opera house a bouquet thrown back off the stage strikes an appalled Englishwoman full in the chest and drops a love-note into her lap, and the man who has come all this way to take a baby away from its father is hauled by the arms over the balustrade into that father's box and welcomed as a brother. It is the happiest scene E.M. Forster ever wrote, and it stands two chapters from the most terrible. Sawston had sent its widow to Italy for a change of air and got back a telegram: she had married the twenty-one-year-old son of a dentist. Everything Forster would spend his life on is already in this first novel, hotter and cruder for being early: the muddle, the sunlight that shames the people standing in it, the gulf between those who feel and those who are only respectable. A carriage overturns on a wet road at night, a child is dead in the mud, and the unbearable thing is how ordinary the goodwill was that killed him.