Sheila Hancock stars in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E. M. Forster’s glorious tale of love in Italy and England.

Lucy Honeychurch is an innocent abroad. Under the care of her well-meaning but infuriating chaperon, cousin Charlotte, she is completing the final part of a conventional well-bred English upbringing - the Grand Tour. But the sensual atmosphere of the Florentine countryside exercises a strange power over Lucy’s half-formed and untested character, as do her fellow guests at the Pension Bertolini.

Back home in Surrey, Lucy fights the passions stirred in her by Italy and becomes very respectably engaged to the cultured Cecil Vyse. It promises to be a conventional life until, one day, Florence and all its accompanying emotion resurfaces in the form of young George Emerson. Torn between society’s expectations and the stirrings of her quickening heart, Lucy struggles with her dilemma until her warring emotions reach an explosive climax.

E.M. Forster’s portrayal of the richness of Italy and the contrasting formality of Victorian England are wonderfully evoked in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatision.