A Room with a View

E.M. Forster published A Room with a View in 1908, when he was twenty-nine, and it is by some margin his most immediately enjoyable novel — a comedy of English social constraint and Florentine liberation that reads faster than it has any right to. But to call it merely charming is to miss what Forster is actually doing.

The novel's central argument is about authenticity versus performance, and about the English middle class's compulsive preference for the second. Lucy Honeychurch, on a chaperoned tour of Florence with her cousin Charlotte, finds herself in a pension populated by the kind of English tourists who have brought England with them — who travel through Italy without letting Italy touch them. The Emersons, father and son, offer the opposite: directness, emotion, the willingness to be moved.

What makes Forster's comedy pointed rather than merely satirical is that Lucy is not stupid. She is talented (the piano scenes establish this early), perceptive, and capable of feeling exactly what the novel says she's suppressing. Her engagement to Cecil Vyse — a man who appreciates art but cannot experience it, who loves Lucy as an acquisition — is not something she stumbles into. She chooses it, because it fits the shape of the life she's been trained to want.

The Italy half of the novel (Part One) and the England half (Part Two) are formally distinct. Florence breaks things open; Surrey closes them. Forster uses landscape as argument throughout, and he uses it better here than anywhere else in his fiction.

Lucy Honeychurch — the novel's emotional center, talented and self-suppressing, who has been trained to translate her feelings into the language of propriety before she's finished having them. Her piano playing is the tell: she plays as she feels, which is the one place she cannot lie. Her progress toward self-knowledge is the plot.

George Emerson — the young man who kisses Lucy in a field of violets and will not politely pretend he didn't. He is not conventionally romantic; he is earnest, philosophically inclined, and genuinely in love. Forster avoids making him merely a romantic lead by giving him intellectual substance — his arguments with his father about meaning and happiness are the novel's philosophical core.

Cecil Vyse — one of the great comic villains in English fiction, though Forster does not quite make him a villain. Cecil is not cruel; he is merely incapable of real contact with another person. He aestheticizes Lucy rather than knowing her. The famous "medieval" passage — Lucy is to Cecil like a painting in a frame — is the exact diagnosis of what is wrong with him.

Charlotte Bartlett — Lucy's chaperone, apparently a figure of constraint, actually (in the novel's final pages) something more complex. Forster gives Charlotte a small, silent act of generosity at the end that transforms retrospective understanding of everything she has done.

No. 1 · The murder in the piazza. In Chapter Four, Lucy witnesses a stabbing in the Piazza della Signoria and faints into George Emerson's arms. The scene is abrupt, violent, and completely out of key with the comedy around it. Forster uses it to establish that real experience — unlike the managed experience the pension provides — breaks through convention before you have time to perform a response. Lucy's fainting is not genteel weakness; it is honest shock.

No. 2 · The violets. George kisses Lucy among the violets on the hillside above Florence, and Lucy reports it to Charlotte rather than acknowledging to herself what she felt. The gap between her emotional truth (the kiss mattered) and her social performance (it was an outrage that must be concealed) is the novel's central subject. Forster renders this gap without editorializing, which makes it more devastating.

No. 3 · The Sunday at the rectory. In Part Two, Cecil reads aloud from a novel — which turns out to contain a fictionalized version of George and Lucy's Italian encounter — while Lucy accompanies the scene on the piano. The structural irony is not subtle, but Forster earns it: Lucy is literally playing the soundtrack to her own suppressed story while it is being read to her, and she doesn't recognize it.

The novel is in the public domain; Project Gutenberg has a reliable text if you want to read free. But the Penguin or Oxford editions earn their introductions.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone interested in English social fiction: this is Forster at his most accessible and his argument is sharp.
• Readers who want a short, pleasurable novel that repays attention — it is 250 pages and goes quickly.
• Anyone who wants to understand what Edwardian class constraint actually felt like from the inside, rather than as a period backdrop.

Skip it if you are…

• Looking for formal experimentation or difficulty: A Room with a View is a comedy of manners, beautifully executed, not an avant-garde novel.
• Not interested in the period: the Edwardian social machinery requires some patience if it strikes you as simply alien.

Read Part One (Florence) and Part Two (England) as the two movements Forster intends — notice the shift in atmosphere and what it costs Lucy to leave Italy for Surrey. Pay attention to the piano scenes: Lucy's playing is always the emotional truth her speech is concealing. Charlotte Bartlett rewards re-reading; on a second pass, her actions in the final chapters look entirely different.

The comedy depends on Forster maintaining perfect authorial distance — he is never sentimental about Lucy's situation, which is what allows the reader to feel it clearly.

• Jane Austen — Emma (1815). The formal ancestor: a heroine who misreads her own emotions, a comic structure that is also a structure of self-knowledge, a social world that enforces particular kinds of blindness.
• Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905). The American parallel: similar social constraint, no comedy, much darker outcome. Wharton's version of what happens to a woman who doesn't find her George Emerson in time.
• Henry James — The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The extended treatment of the same theme: an intelligent woman's preference for the wrong man. James is slower and more inward; Forster is faster and more social.

1. Cecil Vyse loves Lucy but cannot see her. What does Forster suggest is the difference between aesthetic appreciation and love?
2. Charlotte Bartlett appears to be the novel's primary obstacle to Lucy's happiness. How do her actions in the final chapters change this reading?
3. Italy and England function as opposite moral landscapes in the novel. What specifically does Forster associate with each? Is he romanticizing Italy?
4. Lucy's piano playing is always more emotionally honest than her speech. Why does Forster use music this way, and what does it suggest about the relationship between art and self-knowledge?
5. George Emerson is entirely unlike the romantic heroes of the novels the pension residents read. What makes him a different kind of romantic figure?
6. The novel ends happily, which is unusual for Edwardian fiction about social constraint. Does the happy ending feel earned, or does it require the reader's indulgence?