A Room with a View

"Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in . Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love." - Zadie Smith