Her companion (Helena Bonham Carter) soon provides the breathless news that the widow has fallen in love. Where Angels Fear to Tread, one of his early novels and not his best, considers this theme in its story of an attractive widow, Lilia Herriton ( Helen Mirren), who is sent out to Italy to rest, mourn, and renew herself. Into these worlds venture outsiders - by class, race, income or ideology - who are first rejected by the English, and then end up changing them in ways that could not have been anticipated. Not royalty, but English people who know who they are, who their families are, and where their money will come from with little effort of their own. His starting place is the complacent, self-contained world of the Edwardian upper-middle and upper classes. Most of his novels, however, address the alienation he must have felt his most important characters are strangers in strange lands. Maurice, which was about homosexuals, was published posthumously. Foster was an outsider, a homosexual who did not address that subject in the novels published during his lifetime, and probably stopped writing novels when he found he could no longer ignore such a central aspect of his life.
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