A Room with a View (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By E. M. Forster and Radhika Jones

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.

A charming tale of the battle between bourgeois repression and radical romanticism, E. M. Forster’s third novel has long been the most popular of his early works. A young girl, Lucy Honeychurch, and her chaperon—products of proper Edwardian England—visit a tempestuous, passionate Italy. Their “room with a view” allows them to look into a world far different from their own, a world unconcerned with convention, unfettered by social rituals, and unafraid of emotion. Soon Lucy finds herself bound to an obviously “unsuitable” man, the melancholic George Emerson, whose improper advances she dare not publicize. Back home, her friend and mentor Charlotte Bartlett and her mother, try to manipulate her into marriage with the more “appropriate” but smotheringly dull Cecil Vyse, whose surname suggests the imprisoning effect he would have on Lucy’s spirit.

A colorful gallery of characters, including George’s riotously funny father, Lucy’s sullen brother, the novelist Eleanor Lavish, and the reverend Mr. Beebe, line up on either side, and A Room with a View unfolds as a delightfully satiric comedy of manners and an immensely satisfying love story.

Radhika Jones is a freelance writer and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433069

E. M. Forster

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. Born in London to an Anglo-Irish mother and a Welsh father, Forster moved with his mother to Rooks Nest, a country house in rural Hertfordshire, in 1883, following his father’s death from tuberculosis. He received a sizeable inheritance from his great-aunt, which allowed him to pursue his studies and support himself as a professional writer. Forster attended King’s College, Cambridge, from 1897 to 1901, where he met many of the people who would later make up the legendary Bloomsbury Group of such writers and intellectuals as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. A gay man, Forster lived with his mother for much of his life in Weybridge, Surrey, where he wrote the novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature sixteen times without winning, Forster is now recognized as one of the most important writers of twentieth century English fiction, and is remembered for his unique vision of English life and powerful critique of the inequities of class.

Book preview

Introduction

If you were a young woman, from a relatively well-off family, coming of age in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, you might think of passing a month or two in Italy, to prepare yourself for a life in polished society by learning a little something about Italian art. You would select a companion, as it would be neither convenient nor seemly to travel alone. An older, unmarried cousin would serve nicely as chaperone. And you would buy a guidebook, either Murray’s or Baedeker’s, the two most popular travel series of the day. Let’s say you opt for Baedeker. You would find, in your new Baedeker, suggestions for itineraries of varying durations, as well as hotels and pensions recommended in each city on your chosen agenda, and you would write to these lodgings to engage rooms. Passports, Baedeker informs you, though not required in Italy, are occasionally useful—to pick up a registered letter, for example—and for 2 shillings this document is yours, with an added fee if you obtain it through a travel agent such as Thomas Cook. You were planning to visit Cook’s offices anyway, since his coupons, redeemable for food and lodging at many foreign hotels, will no doubt come in handy as well. These preparations made, you pack your suitcase with clothing fit for the season (consulting Baedeker, of course, for an analysis of the Mediterranean climate) and embark, setting off from London for the boat train to Paris, and from there boarding another train that crosses the Alps. Before you arrive in Turin you mean to have mastered the major points of Professor Anton Springer’s Historical Sketch of Italian Art helpfully provided in Baedeker’s introduction, but you find yourself distracted from study by the passing scenery and the prospect of adventures to come. Who knows (to borrow a line from an E. M. Forster novel) but that you might be transfigured by Italy? It had happened to the Goths.

Nearly a century has passed since Forster sent Miss Lucy Honeychurch and her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, on their memorable trip to Italy, the trip that makes up the first half of A Room with a View. We now have many more travel guides to choose from, as well as faster modes of transportation and more stringent methods of identification (passports are most definitely required). But Baedeker is still in print, and the boat train still running, and in essence Forster’s tourists are still familiar to anyone who has ever taken guidebook in hand and set off for foreign shores.

What is surprising, in fact, is how little tourism has changed over the past hundred years, once it made the leap from a privileged activity to a mass pursuit. Dean MacCannell, in his classic study of tourism, suggests a neat sociological evolution of travel: "What begins as the proper activity of the hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British ‘gentleman’), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist)" (The Tourist, p. 5; MacCannell’s emphasis; see For Further Reading). That final transition came to pass in the nineteenth century, thanks to a number of factors conducive to middle-class travel. It was a time of relative peace and overall economic prosperity in England and the Continent. Advances in transportation—railways and steamers—brought cities and continents closer together, and the consolidation of Britain’s imperial power made exotic locations like India, Egypt, and South Africa more accessible to English speakers, while fiction and nonfiction set in those regions brought them into the English imagination. Novels championed the near abroad as well: As early as 1806, Lady Morgan’s immensely popular romance The Wild Irish Girl advertised the attractions of Ireland (cultural, geological, and female), while Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and other writings romanticized the Scottish highlands and the valor of its people. As the century wore on, many best-selling writers published accounts of their own travels: Charles Dickens went to Italy (he carried Murray’s guidebook); the indefatigable Anthony Trollope went to Australia and New Zealand, among numerous other countries. Back home, the Great Exhibition of 1851, with displays representing countries from Russia to the West Indies, attracted some 6 million visitors to London and filled their heads with visions of what lay beyond England’s shores, while Charles Darwin’s voyages demonstrated the potential scientific value of geographical exploration. Progress was a watch-word of the Victorian era, and travel, both foreign and domestic, seemed to go hand in hand with it.

But perhaps a more subtle factor contributing to the rise of mass tourism was the growing sense of individual liberty and agency among England’s non-aristocratic classes. Three successive Reform Acts, beginning in 1832, extended the franchise so that by 1884 most workingmen and agricultural laborers had gained the right to vote. (The women’s vote would follow in 1918.) The Reform Acts also allowed for more fairly apportioned parliamentary representation, while other legislation supported education for children and began to institute factory reform, improving workplace conditions and approving measures for the protection of workers. With all these advances came an increasing sense of empowerment among the non-aristocratic classes, and consequently a heightened sense of opportunity for further advancement. The Grand Tour had been an institution among aristocrats, in which men and women of privilege traveled through Europe as if it were a finishing school, absorbing its art, culture, and languages at their leisure, the better to enrich themselves and English society on their return. Why should the professional classes, and someday maybe even working-class men and women, not engage in this pursuit as well?

Engage in it they did, coming in droves from England and from America. Here is Mark Twain chronicling the Anglo-American zeitgeist in the summer of 1867 as he prepares for a pleasure cruise scheduled to hit all the hot spots in Europe and the Mediterranean:

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement. Everybody was going to Europe—I, too, was going to Europe. Everybody was going to the famous Paris Exposition—I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition. The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate. If I met a dozen individuals during that month who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now (The Innocents Abroad, p. 27).

But, as Twain’s satirical travelogue goes on to demonstrate, no sooner did tourists emerge as a distinct species than they were subject to ridicule as vulgar blots on whatever landscape they happened to visit. (That attitude, too, has not changed much in the past century.) And no sooner had tourists begun to penetrate en masse the towns and villages of Europe and Asia than their successors were inspired to root out places that had not yet been desecrated by tourists’ footsteps, in a self-perpetuating quest for authentic experience, the true Italy, the true India, and so on. The great invention of pioneering British travel agent Thomas Cook was the group excursion—he led his first in 1841 and ultimately escorted parties numbering in the hundreds—but the paths Cook’s tourists tracked through France and Switzerland, Egypt and Palestine, India and Australia, became precisely the paths that other tourists sought to avoid. We find the operative phrase, so common in our contemporary travel lexicon, as early as 1905 in Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread: In a place like this, writes the widowed Lilia from the small Italian town she is visiting, one really does feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten track.

Still, the beaten track continued to suffice for many, including Lucy Honeychurch, the young heroine of A Room with a View. Lucy is a satisfied adherent to Baedeker, nor is she too self-conscious to claim the label of tourist when asked by the resident Anglican chaplain, Mr. Eager, what her purpose is in visiting Italy. A Room with a View is a short book, in which characterization necessarily happens quickly, and part of the reason tourism is such an important subject in any discussion of the novel is that the characters in Lucy’s circle in Florence are defined by their attitudes toward it. In this case, the word elicits an illuminating diatribe: I quite agree, said Miss Lavish, who had several times tried to interrupt his mordant wit. The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace (p. 60).

Oh, indeed, said Mr. Eager. "Are you indeed? If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little—handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or ‘through’ and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: ‘Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?’ And the father replies: ‘Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.’ There’s traveling for you. Ha! ha! ha!"

There we have Mr. Eager, the pompous expatriate, and Miss Lavish, novelist and self-proclaimed seeker of Italy’s essence, who wants to emancipate Lucy from Baedeker (p. 19) and who seems not to realize that her protests against tourists and the typical tourist experience are themselves well-traveled objections, stale and predictable. We know the Miss Alans, too, the elderly spinsters who come abroad for the climate but bring England with them, in their attitudes, their prejudices, and their stash of digestive biscuits. And we recognize Mr. Beebe, the gentleman clergyman and affable observer, able to cross social boundaries with ease.

Mr. Beebe’s skill as mediator is introduced in the novel’s opening pages, but the communication gap he bridges is not where we might expect to find it, between the Italians and the English. Rather, it occurs within England, dividing people who represent different classes and thus hold different points of view. The deal he brokers is the all-important agreement between Miss Bartlett and Mr. Emerson in which Mr. Emerson and his son, George, give up their south-facing rooms so that Lucy and Charlotte might have a view of the Arno. A third party is necessary in these negotiations only because Mr. Emerson has offered the trade in a tactless sort of way: outright, over the Pension Bertolini dinner table, with more vigor than is suitable to express toward two ladies with whom he is not yet acquainted. Charlotte, who subscribes to the rule of social niceties, finds the Emersons ill-bred (p. 8); Mr. Emerson, who subscribes to the Transcendental philosophy of his namesake, finds Charlotte’s prim hesitation over accepting the rooms ridiculous. Lucy does not yet know on whose side she falls. But when the swap is accomplished, she looks out her window that evening thinking of the kind old man who had enabled her to see the lights dancing in the Arno and the cypresses of San Miniato, and the foot-hills of the Apennines, black against the rising moon (pp. 16—17). She knows, in other words, that it is Mr. Emerson who has contributed to the broadening of her horizons.

Lucy comes of age, as Forster himself did, at a time of sea changes in Britain and the world: the ebb of British imperial power, the end of the Victorian era, the onset of the modern age, and the portents of a world war. It is a moment of epic transition signaled from the novel’s first page, when Forster turns our eye to the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that grace the dining room of the Pension Bertolini, reminding those present that the era of Victoria and Tennyson has passed irrevocably into history. But like those portraits, the historical transitions at work in A Room with a View act chiefly as backdrops for the deeply personal issues with which Lucy struggles. After all, Lucy is no revolutionary; she moves within the parameters of what is possible for a girl of her age and situation. What social boldness she has comes in spurts, often uncertain ones. She expresses herself most effectively in indirect ways, and not in words but in music, sitting at the piano. Confident in Beethoven, she is nevertheless hesitant without her Baedeker; her artistic connection to music does not manifest itself outside that medium. It is tempting to accept Mr. Beebe’s assertion that if Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting—both for us and for her (p. 34) as a formula for the novel, but Forster leaves us in doubt as to whether Lucy ever fulfills that potential; indeed, whether she ever could. The ending that awaited most literary heroines of the Victorian era—marriage—will be her ending too. Where she finds room to distinguish herself, to inhabit the freedoms of this age of transition, is in the manner of man she will marry, and that is where the energies of the novel are focused.

A Room with a View also inhabits an age of transition from the point of view of literature. The three-decker novel that had dominated the second half of the nineteenth century was now a dinosaur, virtually extinguished in the 1890s by the onset of cheap, one-volume editions, and its complex plots and sometimes belabored prose were giving way along with its physical bulk. Forster’s early novels demonstrate this shift in action. There is a casual quality to his prose that makes his novels themselves seem casually constructed, as if they were the natural result of recording experience on paper. The influential American critic Lionel Trilling, describing the colloquial unpretentiousness of Forster’s style, cites it as proof that Forster was content with the human possibility and content with its limitations (quoted in Wilde, ed., Critical Essays on E. M. Forster, p. 59). Unlike the writing of the high modernists (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence) who would make their mark in succeeding decades, Forster’s prose does not evince a formal struggle; it does not attempt to break free of perceived linguistic or semantic constraints. Not incidentally, it is not difficult to read. But it would be a mistake, on these grounds, to think of Forster as artless. A close look at the underpinnings of A Room with a View—its language, its motifs, its structure—shows a craftsman at work.

There is, first of all, the role of the narrative voice in absorbing and reflecting the novel’s themes through language. We might begin with the narrator’s treatment of Lucy, who is on the verge of learning to interpret the world and its inhabitants but often takes refuge in the opinions of others rather than attempt to puzzle things out on her own. In the first chapter, as she copes with the repressive Charlotte, the tactless Emersons, and the mildly interfering Mr. Beebe, she is described as bewildered (p. 16); she had the sense of larger and unsuspected issues (p. 16) that she fails to identify, let alone resolve. Unable to determine what to make of the Emersons, she finally asks Mr. Beebe directly: Old Mr. Emerson, is he nice or not nice? I do so want to know (p. 39). This perplexity, presented quite baldly by the narrator, is part of what makes Lucy convincing as a modern heroine: that she does not make any claims to being particularly heroic.

But in addition to showing Lucy’s tendency to apply to higher authority, Forster demonstrates just how those higher authorities can insinuate their ideas into one’s individual perspective. We find Lucy on her first morning in Florence gazing idly out the window and taking in the everyday activity on the street. The narrator comments: Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveler who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it (pp. 18—19). Later that morning, alone in Santa Croce and bereft of her Baedeker (Miss Lavish has inadvertently run off with it), Lucy is faced with the challenge of negotiating the church’s formidable artistic holdings without aid.

Of course, it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn!

And how very cold! Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the

presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was

proper. But who was to tell her which they were? (p. 23).

Taken under the Emersons’ wing, she finds the frescoes at last and issues her judgment.

I like Giotto, she replied. "It is so wonderful what they say about

his tactile values. Though I like things like the Della Robbia babies

better" (p. 28).

Clearly Lucy has read somewhere that Giotto’s tactile values are noteworthy. (It would likely have been in Bernard Berenson’s The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, written in 1896, which praised the Italian master’s ability to stimulate the sense of touch with his work—and which Forster apparently despised.) Forster shows us, by tracing the phrase from the narrative voice to Lucy’s thoughts and finally to her conversation, how an idea like tactile values gets reproduced, how it insinuates itself into and shapes one’s perception. But because he leaves out exactly what they say about Giotto’s tactile values, and what would be proper to feel in front of them, Lucy is reduced to merely parroting an observation that is empty; she doesn’t really seem to believe in it, and it serves only to distance her from the frescoes she has been so eager to see. Her own visceral reactions—the vastness of Santa Croce, its coldness, and the vitality of the Della Robbia babies—contain much more spirit, but she is not yet confident enough to trust in it.

Because the viewing of art is such an integral part of the tourist experience, it becomes an integral part of the narrative experience as well, one from which few characters are spared. At the climax of the Florence section of the novel, when George Emerson impulsively kisses Lucy in a field of violets, a fellow tourist interrupts the two. Before she could speak, almost before she could feel, a voice called, ‘Lucy! Lucy! Lucy!’ The silence of life had been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stood brown against the view (p. 67). It is Charlotte, but with this description she is condensed into a literal blot on the landscape, a kind of impressionistic smudge; she is nothing more than a voice and the color of her dress, a mere pairing of sensory perceptions, and significantly, she appears as such at a moment when Lucy’s senses have been assaulted in a completely new way. The description, in other words, is perfectly in keeping with the situation; the language not only records the plot, but subtly illuminates it.

And so we find, in A Room with a View, that looking at people is not so different from looking at art, though unfortunately without Baedeker’s stars to indicate which are most worthy of our gaze. Cecil Vyse, Lucy’s fiance, who appears on the scene once the story has moved to England, likens Lucy, with her wonderful reticence, to a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us (p. 87). Later, when Lucy protests Cecil’s machinations over the rental of Cissie Villa to the Emersons, he decides that she had failed to be Leonardesque (p. 113), and we see that his aesthetic comparison is in fact a way of flattening Lucy’s personality. But, to be fair, in evaluating Lucy through the prism of art, Cecil is only following a precedent set much earlier in the novel. Lucy herself, in Santa Croce, assesses George Emerson in a similar vein:

She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his face was rugged, and—until the shadows fell upon it—hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns (p. 28).

If Lucy is viewed as a work of art (as the title of chapter 9 proclaims), then so is George, and so, for that matter is Cecil, whom the narrator introduces to us as mediaeval. Like a Gothic statue (p. 85). Thus even the reader is made complicit in the mode of art appreciation; we are instructed to see Cecil that way, even as Forster points out the potential dangers of doing so.

This continuity of outlook encouraged by Forster is just one of the elements that unites the two halves of A Room with a View. The scene change that occurs midway through the novel from Florence to Surrey is dramatic in terms of the mileage, and it is tempting to think that substantively different attitudes or ideas will emerge with the new landscape. Traveling with Lucy, we have been in a foreign country, and now we are back on familiar territory. But where character and narrative are concerned, setting can be moot, however picturesque. Lucy herself suggests as much with her assertion on that first, disappointing day at the Pension Bertolini, that with no Arno view and a hostess with a Cockney accent, she and Charlotte might just as well be in London. They are trapped in a little tourist bubble, not surprising when one seeks out the comforts of home abroad—an English tea and convivial, unthreatening English company. Just as equally, though, could Lucy say on returning to Summer Street that she might as well be in Italy, because it turns out she is just as easily perplexed in her family home, surrounded by familiar flora and fauna, as at the Bertolini dinner table or in the dim light of Santa Croce. In fact, we might argue that in England Lucy is at a distinct disadvantage. Abroad, as a tourist, one can be excused for conversational slips, for losing one’s way, for placing one’s trust too quickly in a fellow foreigner or a kindly Italian. There are guidebooks published expressly to tell you where to find the best view, which fresco not to miss in the church, how long to stay in Florence and how long in Rome. At home there is no guidebook (or if there were, you would look a fool consulting it). If you are inarticulate it is your own failing, and you must decide on your own whether one view is better than another. Or, in Lucy’s case, whether one suitor is better than another. Reviewing the novel in 1908, The Outlook described Lucy as one of those uncomfortable girls who cannot make up their minds (quoted in Gardner, p. 116), but really, it is easy to see how she gets into trouble on that count. In Florence, she experiences the luxury of having numerous other people help make it up for her—not only Charlotte, Miss Lavish, the Miss Alans, Mr. Eager, and Mr. Beebe, but also cultural heavyweights such as John Ruskin, the preeminent Victorian art critic (much quoted

Reviews for A Room with a View (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[nordie_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

shortish book full of silly mis understandings and English manners disguised as politeness (especially in their disguise of the English Abroad) that gets Lucy engaged to Cecil, only to be confronted with George. George, the awkward Englishman she met on holiday in Florence, who kissed her in the violets, and who she's in love with really but it takes her ages, and a return to England, to realise she's in love

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've seen the movie, read the book and have now experienced it as a audiobook. Which is best? All of them have their strengths, I don't really have a preference. The story itself is by turns romantic and comedic and at times profound.

[wunder-62679 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

If this is the best of Edwardian literature, then it is a period to avoid. We have cardboard cutout characters with no personality and no development. They have sudden revelations, but most of the time they are trying to sort out who to snub. They argue about coincidences in a plot almost entirely made up of accidental meetings. For a while, I thought the whole thing was a massive, tiresome satire, but I think it isn't that ambitious. It is some sort of tiresome morality play about convention and status, I guess.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reread-Started as a 5-star, and absolutely remains a 5-star. I have only one nit to pick, and for me that is pretty amazing. Said nit: Why does Cecil suddenly become human, and not just human but certifiably humble, after Lucy shares her reasons for ending the engagement? Okay, back to work. I do not doubt that I will be thinking about this issue all day despite back-to-back meetings that actually require my focused participation. Full rtfBack for the review --It is easy to forget E.M. Forster was a radical, but he most definitely was. He hung out with Virginia Woolf, he was (obliquely) public about being a homosexual at a time when that was a dangerous choice, he championed gender equality, and he rejected the strictures of upper crust British life in theory if not always in practice. His chafing under societal pressures is so central not just to this book, but to his next, the beautiful Howard's End, and the frustrating and touching Maurice. When I read this in my 20's I don't think I realized how revolutionary some of this was. That may be in part because discussion about the rights of workers and women gets mashed up with overly romantic somewhat nauseating messaging about how love is the answer to all things. Anyway, reading this many years later I was astonished by how ahead of its time much of this was. George says that the future must be one in which men and women are equal. This is really quite shocking. More shocking though is the subtle way in which Forster conveys Mr. Beebe's homosexuality, and hints at Cecil's in the early part of the last century. Most shocking perhaps is Lucy's rejection of money and family to run off and find passion with a socialist aesthete. Could anything have been a more clear rejection of the tenets of 1920's British mores? And Forster makes the reader feel good about all this, casting the horrid Charlotte and the effete Cecil as the exemplars of things proper and English and casting the sweet, shy, depressive George and his loving and defiantly innocent father as the exemplars of modern thinking. How could anyone root for Charlotte and Cecil in that matchup?I know this is primarily a love story, passion over propriety and all that. I love a love story, but honestly reading this as just a love story it doesn't really do it for me. There is, literally, not a single conversation or interaction between George and Lucy that would indicate why he loves her. It is hormones. At least Cecil loved her for her music. George thought her beautiful most definitely and in need of his protection (to save her from ugliness like the blood covered postcards) but they never exchange any other information. Lucy loves him in part for his awkward decency shown in the ceding of his rooms and their view and the postcard incident, and for his honesty and spontaneity in expressing his feelings, and hormones too. There is something there, but George, no. There is not a lot to root for when boiled down to romance. Luckily the book is so much more than that. It is a wonderful and witty slice of life, it is a call for a new day in England, it is an ode to Forster's beloved Italy, and it is a coming of age story (as regards Lucy.) A joy to (re)read. But yeah, I still don't get how the scales fell from Cecil's eyes. I really want to understand that better.

[suesbooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was moderately interesting to read for the historical setting. I also appreciated that Forster was strong in his belief that women could lead independent lives. I did not care for the writing and felt some of it was unclear. I liked many of his literary references.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lucy, a young English woman, travels to Florence Italy, accompanied by an older cousin. The people she meets there at the Pension Bertolini begin to open her eyes to the ways of the world, including romantic inclinations. A study in the repressed morals of Edwardian England. I ended up liking this novel but not nearly as much as I did Howard's End.

[rajivc_18 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent book in many ways. This seems to have been one of his earlier books, and I have seen the views of some critics who mention that the book is not as sophisticated as his later books, like "Howard's End" and "A Passage to India."For my part, I enjoyed the book. We all know that E.M. Forster had an almost lyrical style of writing. He could make images dance before your eyes. This is a love story and a gentle satire on English life at the turn of the 19th century. We lie to ourselves, and then also, to others. We deny our feelings, and often choose, or reject, mates due to social prejudices. In this case, unlike "A Passage to India", there is redemption and a happy ending to the tale. Love rules, prejudiced banished.

[gpangel_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster is a 2017 Amazon Classics publication. ( Originally published in 1908)In the continuing saga of 'taming the TBR' this year, I have found it easier to locate classics that I have been meaning to read for years. The brevity of this one convinced me to make time for it immediately instead of letting it continue to gather 'virtual' dust on my Kindle. I had a little trouble with this one- in fact- I almost gave up on it. I was well over halfway into it before I felt engaged in it. By the time I was finished, though, I was glad I stuck with it. This is a light story, with some dramatics, terrific locales, fantastic characterizations, and a moral that is timeless, but overall, I enjoyed it enough, but it didn't make a lasting impression on me. 3 stars4 stars

[profh-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Once more we have the English abroad and looking to marry, but without the interesting complications of A Passage to India. Like so many English novels of this era, the plot is entirely centered on the question of marry the person you want or the person that others think you should. This question having been turned over by thousands of similar novels offers little new insight. The shock created of a sudden kiss feels ridiculous. I'm not sure how much we can learn today from a people who bottled up their feelings and desires as much as these. The most interesting passage may have been the group bath with its hints of latent sexual desire and sensuality that went far beyond any romance Lucy Honeychurch may ever know...I will say that unlike many of this novel's contemporaries, it is relatively short. I'd only recommend it to someone who is a serious student of the genre or of Forster.

[lethalmauve · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Every time I try to write a review about this small book something holds me back and I end up writing nothing about it. It has been 5 months since I read this so I will most likely depend the review on my memory of emotions.I shall start by telling a personal story about that one time when an old lady from church visited my mother's house for some house-to-house prayer related to the Virgin Mary. She greeted me with a "Why are the windows closed?" which I mindlessly answered with "Why should they be opened?". Apparently, she perceived my response as rude while I wondered what was there to see outside these closed windows other than my grandfather's kitchen and cats stretching their bodies along the pavement. As absurd as this story was I can't help but make a connection of these windows to E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. Short and semi-sweet. A story of a lady torn between a dull, pretentious man of high class who she did not feel the least bit in love with and another man of lower class without the expected societal upbringing. Like finding a room with a view, it was, for her, a breath of fresh air, this another man, and made her realize that another perspective of things existed. Unfortunately, although it had made some of its point on happiness and the uncertainty of the future amidst the promise of love, the story unfolded much too quick for my taste and left no room for the right kind of development and romance. I honestly would have liked this better if it was longer, polished, more room for love to breathe, blossom, and grow.

[kristykay22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Funny, romantic, and pointed, with a bit of turn-of-the-century girl power sprinkled on top, A Room with a View is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Lucy leaves her close-knit family in the English countryside for "must do" trip to Italy, chaperoned by her needy and trying older cousin, Charlotte. Once installed in a pension in Florence run by a trustworthy Englishwoman, the two are disappointed to find that they have been given rooms that look out over the courtyard instead of over the river. An eccentric gentleman and his son, the Emersons, offer to trade their rooms with lovely views and after a lot of hemming and hawing over the propriety of such a thing, the ladies agree. Lucy is caught between her romantic and independent nature, and the desire to please her family and do what is correct in the eyes of Edwardian society. She is a bit undone by the unconventional George Emerson, a feeling which comes to a head in a spectacular field of violets and a last minute flight of the ladies to Rome. Part II brings us back to Lucy's home, along with an ill-matched fiancé that no one really likes that much. When the Emersons come back into Lucy's life, she finds herself deeper and deeper in a muddle that is partly her fault, and partly the fault of English society. Forster's characters are nicely written and, while he does hit you over the head with the moral of the story a bit, the warmth and humor that comes through, particularly in the relationship between Lucy, her mother, and her brother, keep the book from being dogmatic or cliched. A fun classic!

[etxgardener · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Miss Honeychurch learns about love on a trip to Florence with her cousin Charlote. Now home will she submit to propriety and marry the stuffy Cecil Wyse, or follow her heart and grab happiness with George Emerson. A positively luminous novel.

[stephanie_m-868484 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have no idea when I started this audiobook, but I'm pretty sure it was last autumn. (So I picked a random date). I turn to it for a few hours a night, when I don't have any library audiobooks to listen to. It's a slow, calm novel of an earlier time when things may seem much easier to us all, now. It's also one of my all-time favorite movies, especially because Helena B. Carter, Daniel Day Lewis, and Julian Sands (who was quite the hottie way back when).
Now I've finished this audiobook for the first time, and it's almost exactly like my favorite movie, but with a lot more conversing in it. And Julian Sands' character had black hair, which is weird to me. Probably because the whole time I listened to this audiobook, I pictured the movie in my head. Almost every scene. And now I have to go watch the movie again.....
If you love period novels, please give this novel or audiobook a try. It's well worth it. 4 stars.

[suej1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Revisiting old favourites is a wonderful thing. :) I find I discover fresh perspectives or new delights that I don't remember from a first reading. But in the case of this book, that was a very long time ago! So it was as if I was discovering the story all over again. I love this book!

[5eva5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While being toured around Italy with her fussy older cousin and chaperone, Miss Lucy Honeychurch meets father and son Emerson, both of which make a huge impression on her, one that follows her back to England and changes everything. This is such a beautiful novel - one of my all-time favorites - so I can't say anything other than I love the characters, the setting, the story, the language, and everything else. I saw the Merchant Ivory movie version before reading this for the first time, so those faces are in my mind when I read and they fit so very well. Beautiful, beautiful.

[cindywho-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Listened to the Classic Tales podcast version. Not bad.

[breic-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It's fun and builds up stronger, but I never really connected with it. Maybe the weak start threw me.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The inhabitants of Windy Corner (as well as Pensione Betolini) are left pale and perforated after Forster's serial needling. Forster can only stop heckling his characters long enough to appreciate the song of the season's and the subtle currents of music.

[herenya_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Honeychurch and her cousin Charlotte are visiting Florence when they meet Mr Emerson and his son. Later in England, when they encounter the Emersons again, they both have private reasons for wanting to avoid them.I was delighted by much of this; it is astutely observant and gently humorous. Much ado is made over a kiss, which is baffling from a modern perspective, but I suspect this not only reflects attitudes common at the time but that Forster is intentionally showing that his characters are being a bit ridiculous.I would be even more enthusiastic if the final chapters had unfolded as they did. There’s an irritating scene where a man lectures Lucy, telling her what she should do. His motives aren’t unsympathetic, and his advice isn’t unreasonable -- but it is uninvited and he persists even when she becomes obviously upset. Moreover, the story then jumps in time, skipping over Lucy deciding what to do next and how she goes about it. I’m pleased with the final result, but why must you diminish her agency like that?It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, “She loves young Emerson.” A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?

[over.the.edge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

# 15 Of 100 Classics Challenge
A Room With A View
By E. M. Forster

Some might say Lucy's conservative values have repressed her life and religion. Her outlook is put to the test when Lucy goes to Italy with her cousin Charlotte. They meet outrageous flamboyant characters like Miss Lavish, Cockney Signora, Me Emerson, Mr Beebe and George, a son.....
Lucy is torn between returning home to her past values or continuing with her new friends unconventional beliefs and energy?
Really good, really quick read. Recommended.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

With old Mr. Emerson and Mr. Beebe, Forster moves the plot along despite silly lying goose Lucy and her tedious traveling companion and cousin, Charlotte. Cecil definitely had his moments, notably because George kept himself an odd mystery.

[deusxmachina-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Liked it. Lucy is a peach, her way to view the world sometimes dreadfully simplistic, sometimes full of wonder and naivety and sometimes, especially in moments of sudden flashes of insights, simply hilarious. Foster likes his characters, even the shady ones, each of them has wit and character in their own unique way, and the whole story is has an optimistic, sometimes even funny air about it.

[booklovers2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Our Book Club Classic Read - Listened to this on audio. An absolute delightful coming of the age love story. A touching story with a splash of comedy. Lucy Honeychurch finds herself in a precarious situation. How do you tell the person you are to marry that you are not as innocent as he thinks? How little lies and omissions come back to haunt her and an unlikely encounter upsets her plans.

[elizabeth_foster-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

I liked the main character's independence and the satirical slant on the snobbery of the English upper class, but most of all I liked that I was reading it in my own room with a view - albeit in Venice, not Florence!

[rakerman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very funny observational humour in Florence, a comedy of interior dialogue and exterior manners. Turns a bit gloomy in Windy Corner, with quite a lot of coincidence needed to set up the action, a situation which the author manages to deal with fairly well. A truly inspiring conclusion where things fall into place, with a very profound view of what it means to live a meaningful life.Abridged audiobook (5 hours 14 minutes) read by Juliet Stevenson:A fairly light abridgement (5 and a quarter hours abridged versus approximately 7 hours and 20 minutes unabridged).Excellent narration.Musical interludes tolerable due to the reference to Lucy's playing.Stop the audio when she says "The End" unless you want the Audible.com voice shouting "THIS IS AUDIBLE DOT COM" at you immediately afterwards.

[ctpress_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A young man steals a kiss from Lucy Honeychurch on a vacation in Italy - and Lucy begins to question her narrow life, her selfish fiancé, her conventional family, her bleak future.What I appreciate about Room With a View- Forsters empathy with his characters. Even aristocratic and selfish Cecil Wyse we sympathise with when he’s rejected.- It’s sunny, optimistic and witty - very witty. If you want the “darker” E. M. Forster read Howard’s End.- I like the way Lucy Honeychurch is questioning herself, her choices, her opinions, her ideals - the way her irrational mind is trying to make sense of the restricted, narrow world she has grown accustomed to.- That George Emerson remains an enigma throughout the story. His actions we get explained mainly through his father - he’s the fresh wind blowing new life into Lucy’s existence - but a big questionmark to Lucy as well as to the readers.

[alanteder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Avoid the 1992 "pre-echo"/"bleed-through" Books on Tape edition (and its later repackaged versions)[4] for "A Room with a View."[1] for the 1992 audiobook by Frederick Davidson. I'm not going to distort the rating for the Edwardian meet-cute romantic-comedy classic "A Room with a View" due to a bad audio experience, so the official vote here is a [4].Otherwise, this is a warning to steer clear of the 1992 Books on Tape audiobook by Frederick Davidson which is badly dated in style but is still being sold as recently as 2017 at Audible Audio. It also betrays its audiotape analog pedigree due to its constant pre-echo / audio bleed-through. This is a quirk from the vinyl/tape era where the audio signal from about 2-3 seconds in the future would "bleed-through" as a artifact in the current signal. The effect is like hearing a phantom distorted conversation constantly in the background of the actual audio that you are listening to. It is enormously annoying and distracting.Frederick Davidson (real name:David Case) was an early legend of the audiobook era and recorded many hundreds of classics. His reading style will seem very old-fashioned now but is still suitable for some characters e.g. Cecil Vyse in the case of "A Room with a View."

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Room With A View by E.M. Forster opens in Florence, Italy where tourists Lucy Honeychurch along with her cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett first make the acquaintance of the Emersons, father and son who give up their rooms to the two English ladies so that they will have a view. The other guests at this small inn all are British and are a varied assortment, but right from the start Charlotte is convinced that the Emersons are ill-bred and should be avoided. Of course the Emerson son, George and Lucy are obviously attracted to each other, but Lucy comes to agree with her cousin and tries to stay away from the Emersons but this often cannot be avoided. On a group trip to the Italian countryside, George not only challenges Lucy’s thinking but also kisses her, which in these rigid Edwardian times was a great affront. Lucy, more disturbed than before, and Charlotte pack up and depart Florence.The story then moves forward a few months to England and Lucy accepting the proposal of Cecil Vyse, much to delight of her family. But Cecil is domineering and judgmental. He is constantly telling Lucy what to think and how to act. When the Emersons appear back on the scene, Lucy feels trapped and cannot admit even to herself how she feels about George, but she does find the courage to break off her engagement to the pompous Cecil. Unknown to Lucy someone is making manoeuvres behind her back and ensuring that all works out the way it should.Room With A View is a romance and had many of the trappings of that genre, an exotic setting with summer storms, hillsides of violets, chance encounters and romantic rivals. This is also a love story with repressed feelings, denial, and class barriers, however, the author with his humorous and satirical style gives this story it’s extra sparkle and wit. While I wasn’t totally enamoured with his characters, I did admire the author’s ability to set the scene, serve up some intriguing dialogue, and give the reader a vivid picture of the repressed nature of Edwardian times.

[lidbud · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is absolutely lovely. I would recommend this to someone who is wanting to read classics, but is unsure where to start, as it is a very easy read.

[ffortsa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had the great pleasure of listening to this via an Audible recording by B.J. Harrison, whose narration was wonderful. It's an early Forster, in which he delightfully skewers Edwardian upper middle class manners. A young woman takes a tour of Italy, with a rather purse-lipped older cousin/chaperone, and of course falls in love, to her own dismay, flees, makes bad choices, and then good ones.The characters are vividly different, and include sneering expats, an inappropriately wild female novelist, a clergyman, a pair of older British spinsters, and even a rather un-Italian pension proprietress. The writing is equally vivid. What is most striking to me is how Forster makes us privy to the thoughts of our heroine Lucy Honeychurch (what a name!). We hear her testing her conventions and emotions, as Italy shows her the possibilities of generous feeling, as well as the dangers of passion. Back home, she struggles to re-adapt to the expectations of society, but plans go delightfully awry.I've rarely laughed out loud walking uptown listening to a novel, but I did several times listening to this.