A Room With a View

Written by E.M. Forster

Narrated by Kara Shallenberg

A Room with a View is a novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.  The first part of the novel is set in Florence, Italy, and describes a young English woman's first visit to Florence, at a time when upper middle class English women were starting to lead independent, adventurous lives. Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her overbearing older cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, and the novel opens with their complaints about the hotel, "The Pension Bertolini." Their primary concern is that although rooms with a view of the River Arno have been promised for each of them, their rooms instead look over a courtyard. A Mr. Emerson interrupts their "peevish wrangling," offering to swap rooms as he and his son, George Emerson, look over the Arno. This behaviour causes Miss Bartlett some consternation, as it appears impolite. Without letting Lucy speak, Miss Bartlett refuses the offer, looking down on the Emersons because of their unconventional behaviour and thinking it would place her under an "unseemly obligation" towards them. However, another guest at the pension, an Anglican clergyman named Mr. Beebe, persuades the pair to accept the offer, assuring Miss Bartlett that Mr. Emerson only meant to be kind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing Corp.
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021

E.M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist, short story writer and essayist best known for his books A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. Born in London as the only child to parents Edward and Lily Forster, Edward inherited a considerable sum of money from his paternal great-aunt that allowed him to embark on a career as a writer. He attended Tonbridge School in Kent but did not enjoy his time there. He then went to King's College in Cambridge where he joined a secret society known as the Apostles, several members of which later helped form the Bloomsbury Group, a literary/philosophical society that boasted such early members as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. Upon graduation, Forster went abroad - often escorted by his mother - and wrote of his travels extensively. Upon his return, he set up residence in Weybridge, Surrey where he would write all six of his novels. All of his books were written between 1908 and 1924 and his last, A Passage to India, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Forster was a homosexual and while he never married, he did have several affairs with male lovers during his lifetime, including a forty-year romance with married policeman Bob Buckingham, at whose home he collapsed and died at age 91 of a stroke. Forster explored his struggle with his own sexuality in his book Maurice. Forster was extremely critical of American foreign policy during his lifetime and rebuffed efforts to film adaptations of his novels due to the fact that the productions would likely use American financing. After his death, however, several of his books were made into films and three of them - A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India are among the most highly regarded films of the late 20th century.