At the beginning of Where Angels Fear to Tread the family of Lilia Herriton's dead husband is sending her to Italy to keep her away from what they find to be unacceptable suitors in England. The novel begins at a train station, initiating a motif that occurs often in Forster's fiction of emotional meetings and partings at stations—emblems of the growing nomadism he sees in modern culture.
Charing Cross 1905"They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off—Philip, Harriet, Irma, Mrs. Herriton herself. Even Mrs. Theobald, squired by Mr. Kingcroft, had braved the journey from Yorkshire to bid her only daughter goodbye." By placing a particular twist on a few key words in these simple opening sentences, Forster initiates the ironic method and direction that he will pursue throughout his fiction. The word "herself" appended to "Mrs. Herriton" implies that she might almost be thought too important to have come to the station, and the beginning of the second sentence seems to emanate from the mind of "Mrs. Herriton herself." The phrase "even Mrs. Theobald" implies that there is some reason she would not have come to do what seems a natural and expected thing: "bid her only daughter goodbye." This juxtaposition of Mrs. Herriton at the end of the first sentence with Mrs. Theobald at the beginning of the second creates a kind of dialogic counterpoint within the narration itself, separate from but related to the actual dialogue between characters. Forster's narrative voice does not maintain a constant point of view, but moves among the viewpoints of different characters and even different narrator(s), illustrating a remark by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin that in the modern novel "one often does not know where the direct authorial word ends and where a parodic or stylized playing with the characters' language begins." The method is effective; for instance, the reader is forced to confront prejudice by being thrust into that point of view.