Novel: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Overview
E. M. Forster’s first novel traces a collision between English propriety and Italian vitality, beginning as social comedy and darkening into tragedy. Set between the drab English town of Sawston and the sunlit Tuscan hill town of Monteriano, it follows a family’s efforts to control a young widow’s choices and the unforeseen consequences of their moral meddling.

Plot
Lilia Herriton, a spirited young widow long dominated by her late husband’s family, the formidable Mrs. Herriton and her children, Philip and Harriet, escapes their narrow world by traveling to Italy with the gentle Caroline Abbott. In Monteriano Lilia falls for Gino Carella, a handsome, poor, and exuberant local. She impulsively marries him, prompting outrage in Sawston. Philip is dispatched to stop the match but arrives too late. What begins in intoxication soon sours: Gino’s immaturity and pride, Lilia’s homesickness and defiance, and the gulf of language and class produce quarrels and disappointment. Pregnant and isolated, Lilia dies in childbirth.

The Herritons, stung more by social embarrassment than grief, fix on a fresh crusade: they will bring the baby to England to be reared “properly.” Philip and the rigid, xenophobic Harriet go to Italy; Caroline, conscience-stricken over her part in Lilia’s fate, follows later. Confronted with Gino’s genuine love for his son and the messy, affectionate life he leads, Philip’s irony softens into humility. Caroline, too, is moved by the young father’s devotion and by the warmth of Monteriano.

Negotiations for the child lurch between condescension and confusion. For a moment it seems an accommodation is possible; then Harriet, acting alone and certain of her righteousness, tries to snatch the baby and spirit him away. The attempt ends in catastrophe, and the child is killed in a roadside accident. Gino’s grief is raw and unanswerable. In the aftermath, Philip and Caroline recognize the depth of what they have destroyed and the blindness that led them to it.

Characters and Setting
Philip Herriton begins as a witty observer who hides behind taste and irony, but Italy forces him to confront his own cowardice and his family’s cruelty. Harriet embodies provincial piety turned vicious; her certainties justify every trespass. Mrs. Herriton’s cool management provides the novel’s chill; her concern is reputation, not human connection. Lilia’s brief rebellion exposes how little space their world allows for female desire and error. Caroline, shy and devout, becomes the book’s moral center, learning to distinguish compassion from interference and discovering an adult courage of her own. Gino is not idealized; he is young, proud, sometimes coarse. Yet he is alive to feeling, and Forster measures him against the English by his capacity for love and grief.

Sawston is a landscape of muffled colors and monitored behavior, while Monteriano’s towers, piazza, and surrounding countryside shimmer with art, heat, and noise. The setting is not mere background; it exerts pressure, exposing the smallness of English pretensions and the costs of passion untutored by prudence.

Themes and Tone
The title, from Pope, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, sounds an ironic note. The Herritons rush in cloaked in righteousness, blind to the lives they unsettle; their folly culminates in disaster. Forster satirizes class snobbery, cultural condescension, and the moral vanity of “doing good,” while acknowledging the hazards of impulsive desire. Comedy of manners gives way to tragedy, and the book’s concluding mood is chastened rather than consoling. Out of wreckage comes a hard-won clarity: love is no excuse for domination, taste no substitute for kindness, and good intentions are not the same as good deeds.