[The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and A Room with a View are all] concerned with the dual theme of personal salvation and the conflict of good and evil. Of the three it is The Longest Journey which is the most emotionally intense and personal, the others being more objectively conceived novels of social comedy….

In each of these novels we have two opposed worlds or ways of life, and characters who oscillate between the two worlds. (p. 48)

In each of these novels, there is a spiritual conflict. In Forster's words, describing Lucy's inner struggle [in A Room with a View],

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended….

The "real," however, seems to be associated with the natural; the "pretended," with the falsities of convention which deny and frustrate the...