A Room with a View is the second book I read by E. M. Forster after A Passage to India. I always thought I would love this book more than A Passage to India, but the opposite happened. A Room with a View, unfortunately, has not been a book that I read very fondly. I have heard many times that the movie is more beautiful than the book. I think this time cinema won.
A Room with a View overwhelmed me because I could not like its characters, and unfortunately, I could not find myself in it. The only character I enjoyed throughout the book was Mr Emerson, who sadly fell ill at the end of the book. (Believe me, this is not a spoiler that affects the novel’s plot in any way.) E. M. Forster deals with classism and the relationships between the classes, love, women and Italy in A Room with a View. I guess you can understand just by reading this book how much the author is passionate about Italy.
This book, the third novel by Forster, is regarded as the most optimistic of his works. Lucy Honeychurch travels to Italy with her cousin Charlotte, who is poorer and older than her. After this trip, she will be another woman. Coincidences that will occur afterwards will completely change Lucy’s life. How do you think Lucy, torn between two completely different men from different classes, will make her choices? The book is about a young woman’s struggle to be herself, with a pleasant life with countryside walks and five o’clock tea in the background. If you’ve read E. M. Forster before and liked it, check it out. Enjoy!
A Room with a View
“But you do,” he went on, not waiting for contradiction. “You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it …”
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy, including A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India. The last brought him his greatest success.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
