A Room With A View

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

A novel of manners by a master. It is set in England in the early 1900’s -- the Edwardian era. As we are told in the introduction, D. H. Lawrence wrote “About social existence, E. M. Forster knew everything.” Christopher Isherwood called him the expert on “My England.” If we switched the setting to the USA, I would think I was reading Edith Wharton. Or Henry James without the subclauses.



We start off with a young upper-middle class British woman visiting Florence. She is chaperoned by a much older cousin. They are disappointed that their room in the pension does not have the promised view. An older man and his son offer to exchange rooms with them. In a private moment the young man, the son, kisses the young woman. She also has another “adventure:” she witnesses a murder in the street.

Such were Edwardian times that the social complexities of the two women accepting or rejecting this offer of the room, and the young woman’s reaction to the kiss, sets the entire plot in motion for 200 pages. Of course in that era the burden of dealing with that stolen kiss falls entirely on the woman. It affects her relationship with her cousin, her mother, her fiancé back in England, her uncle who is a minister and more.

The first half of the story is set in Italy and the second half back at her home in England. We learn a lot about how the British took great pains to avoid (apparently) “getting contaminated” by Italians! The women stay at a pension run by an English woman; they attend services conducted by a British minister. They have a prescribed list of what must be seen. (There were multiple references to Della Robbia babies, so I looked them up – see picture.)



In a remarkable coincidence, the man who kissed her ends up an immediate neighbor back in England, now friends with her brother and fiancé. The young woman has to wrestle with social propriety, gossip and the choice of ‘doing the right thing’ or following her heart. Her fiancé is controlling and she revolts against him trying to shape her into his opinion of what a woman ‘should be.’ So we can also see the story as a feminist text. Here’s some of what the young woman is up against:

“Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte [her cousin] had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would first be censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.”

There is good writing, biting social commentary and humor:

“He seems to see good in everyone. No one would take him for a clergyman.”

Of her mother: “…she doesn’t like anyone to get excited over anything…”

Of the father and son duo: “They must find their level.”

Advice to the young woman from her cousin: “…this our life contains nothing satisfactory.”



E. M. Forster was a gay man, publicly in the closet, although open to his best friends. He lived a long life: 1879 to 1970. A Room with a View is his best-known work according to GR, with about twice as many ratings as either Howards End or A Passage to India. Very early in his life Forster wrote a novel about a gay love affair, Maurice, but it was not published until the year after his death. He must hold the record for being nominated for the Nobel prize but never being awarded one: 16 times. The book was made into a Merchant Ivory film in 1985.

Top photo: the apartment in Florence where the author frequently stayed with his mother, from Wikipedia.
Della Robbia babies from

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 rtf

Back 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

This is me coming late to Forster. I read and loved A Passage to India in university, but a person hardly wants to start at the peak and then circle back to earlier comedies of manners, and somewhere along the line I started conflating Forster with Evelyn Waugh, who I’ve never been terribly impressed by, and I never cared much for the Merchant Ivory films either and so here we are, twenty years later, reading A Room With a View and OH!

It reminded me quite a bit of Austen, with its decorous romances and social satire, but somewhere along the line it takes a stranger tone, people start throwing around the words Love and Passion and Youth not entirely satirically and the mild diversion of seeing whether Lucy Honeychurch will marry the right man or the wrong man suddenly becomes very serious, this is not about romance, this is about darkness and light, the state of one’s soul, the way to be a real person in the world. And there is a dizzying reversal in the line, late in the book: “the night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before.”

So: Forster is not Waugh, and this is a charmingly serious book or a seriously charming book, one thing or the other, and Forster had mastered a tone of knowing everything, and also of knowing what’s important, and of maintaining the reader’s confidence in that tone, at the age of 29, the bastard.

Страхотна класика. Фино написана и забавна, страшно забавна. Героите са интересни, а авторът те оставя сам да прецениш качествата и недостатъците им; оставил ги е да живеят в книгата без изобщо да се меси във възприятията на читателя. Това е роман, който може да се обсъжда с часове - и историята, и постъпките на героите.

Засичал съм в есета на Вирджиния Улф, както и в дневника ѝ, да пише с възхищение за Е. М. Форстър. Сега разбирам защо тези два ума са си били така близки. И двамата са извор на истинска литература.

It was Phaethon who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master's horse up the stony hill.




Fiesole, in the hills northeast of Firenze 9/2/2007


I read this lovely little novel about three months after taking the picture above. I was so thrilled that I had actually been in Florence, where a part of the story takes place. The "main event" of the Florence episode occurs when the English ladies take a chaperoned carriage ride into the hills near Fiesole.

Don't dismiss this "romantic comedy". As noted in Wiki, Modern Library has ranked the book on its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the 20th century. And the "comedy" aspect is not a laugh-out-loud variety, rather a gentle, mildly mocking satire of manners. It could probably be compared to some of Jane Austen's novels - not as great a work as Pride and Prejudice, but in a similar vein.

A few months after reading it I saw the 2007 ITV1 adaptation of the story on PBS. This tacked on a very poignant, and different, ending to the novel, I thought very well done. This is available on Netflix (DVD)