WRITER E.M FORSTER, Arlington Park Mansions, Sutton Lane, Turnham Green, Chiswick, W4

 

Edward Morgan Forster, born 1879, was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.

 

The character Miss Lavish in A Room With a View was based on Emily Spender, a writer Forster and his mother met in their travels, swinging about in a military cape and affecting thin cigars in the pensione smoking room.

 

Emily Spender  (1841-1922) was a leading light of the women's suffrage society in Bath in the 1880s. She was great aunt of the poet, Sir Stephen Spender