Where Angels Fear to Tread

E.M. Forster's debut novel is a sharp, darkly comic tragedy about the collision between English propriety and Italian vitality. When the young widow Lilia Herriton escapes her stifling family for a grand tour of Italy, she falls in love with Gino, a penniless Italian man. Her in-laws are horrified. When Lilia dies in childbirth, they dispatch her brother-in-law Philip, his spinster sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott to rescue the baby from its foreign father and raise it properly English. But Italy proves harder to escape than they imagined, and the forces of passion, corruption, and moral compromise that Lilia succumbed to begin to work on them too. Forster skewers English provincialism with lethal precision while asking an uncomfortable question: what exactly are these people saving the child from? The answer is bothfunnier and more troubling than expected. For all its compact length, this is a novel that rots from the inside out, exposing the hollowness beneath Victorian virtue and the violence hiding behind good intentions.