Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I actually knew very little about this story when I picked it up, although it has been around for 100+ years. I love my late 19th/early 20th century fiction, but I have discovered my limit for reading books with helpless, hapless females. It goes hand-in-hand with the history, but, sheesh, Lilia really was a terrific fool.

It is beautifully written, of course. This is one interesting quote: It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious - the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil. I am not sure I agree.

Forster said in his book Howard's End that "ladies shelter behind men and men shelter behind servants". The sentiment works for this book, too. In this story the men are spineless brutes and the women are foolish and false. The women are helpless without the men and don't even know until it is too late how little these men offer. The English love Italy but seem to detest Italians and doing absolutely nothing all day is perfectly fine, unless you are scheming and conniving - then it's ok.

Lilia, the unlucky, widowed young lady, is summed up perfectly in this quote: She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm..

Super quick summary: Poor Lilia had a very simple hunch that her life would be better if she just closed her eyes and jumped into a marriage without forethought, because she just had to escape the onerous existence in her mother-in-law's house. It does not go well. The end.

FYI - Forster does not favor happily-ever-after.

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