Book 77: Where Angels Fear to Tread

A classic by E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread explores the differences between society in post-Victorian-era England and in Italy. The English 20- or 30-somethings in this novel struggle with their uptight, snotty, heavily-ruled society. They are bored out of their minds, wishing to shake things up.

A trip to Italy adds much-needed excitement, but Italian society turns out to have its own drawbacks. A major flaw is that the women only socialize with family members. If you're sick of family intrusions, you'll just sit alone, forbidden to go outside alone, while your husband gets drunk in town.

The plot is that a young widow travels to Italy with another woman as a chaperone. While there, the widow meets and falls in love with a young Italian man. Scandal!

The best, funniest detail of the novel: the Italian man is socially beneath the English family because he's merely the son of a DENTIST! They look down so ironically on the profession of dentistry.

Great little book. My favorite line: "The train reached Charing Cross, and they parted -- he to go to a matinee, she to buy petticoats for the corpulent poor."



In other news, we have moved to a new apartment and are loving it! We still have boxes and messes and piles to be sorted and put away. We've made quite a big pile of things to donate (too bad we didn't have more time to sort BEFORE we moved it all over here, but the important thing is to get rid of the extra stuff that's dragging us down).

It feels great to lighten up and let go of stuff we don't need. This is the perfect time to be unsentimental -- when we just hauled SO Much stuff around and now are realizing that there's no place for it. My mantra: Let It Go. Let It Go. Just Let It Go.