A Room with a View Summary: Forster's Comedy of Florence, Surrey and Honest Feeling
What A Room with a View is about
E. M. Forster published A Room with a View in 1908. It follows a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, through the tightly managed social world of the Edwardian middle class. The book is set partly in Italy and partly in England, and it works on two levels at once. It is a romance, and it is a comic attack on English manners at the start of the twentieth century.
The title comes from the opening scene and then keeps paying off. Lucy and her cousin Charlotte Bartlett arrive at the Pensione Bertolini in Florence expecting rooms that look over the River Arno. They get rooms facing a dull courtyard instead. Another guest, Mr Emerson, offers to swap, since he and his son George both have the view. Charlotte refuses, partly because the Emersons behave too freely for her taste, partly because she dreads the obligation. Mr Beebe, an Anglican clergyman staying at the pensione, talks her round. Charlotte's verdict on the Emersons is that they must be socialists.
From there the Florence section builds through small incidents that matter more than they first appear. Lucy sets out for the Basilica of Santa Croce with Miss Lavish, a novelist who takes away Lucy's Baedeker and promises to show her the true Italy. They get lost, and Miss Lavish abandons her in the square. Inside the church Lucy meets the Emersons again and finds, to her surprise, that she likes them. Later, in the Piazza della Signoria, she witnesses a murder and faints. George helps her. He retrieves the photographs she dropped, sees they are soaked in blood, and throws them into the Arno.
A day trip to Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, brings the two together again. Lucy wanders off looking for Mr Beebe, her Italian is misunderstood by the driver, and she is led instead to George, standing in a field of violets. He kisses her. Charlotte interrupts, scandalised mostly by her own failure as a chaperone. Lucy promises to say nothing to her mother about the insult, and the two women leave for Rome the next morning.
Part two moves to Surrey and the Honeychurch family home, Windy Corner. Lucy has become engaged to Cecil Vyse, a London aesthete she knew in England and had already refused twice in Italy. Then the Emersons take a lease on a villa in the same village, an arrangement Cecil engineered after a chance meeting in London, mainly to annoy the landlord. The second half plays out the consequences of putting George back within walking distance of a woman who has decided not to think about him.
The main characters
Lucy Honeychurch is the centre of the book, a young woman whose real feelings keep outrunning the vocabulary she has been given for them. Charlotte Bartlett is her fussy spinster cousin and chaperone, anxious about propriety and obligation in equal measure. Mr Emerson is blunt, kind and socially impossible, a man who says plainly that it is defeat rather than victory to separate two people in love. George, his son, is serious and awkward, and Lucy notices how boyish he is. Cecil Vyse is well born, clever and snobbish, a comic figure who thinks himself democratic while despising country society. Mr Beebe, the clergyman, moves between all of them. Freddy, Lucy's brother, supplies the book's best known scene when he invites George for a bathe in a woodland pond, with Mr Beebe eventually joining in, and the whole thing is discovered by Lucy, her mother and Cecil out walking.
The themes
Views are the governing idea. Who gets one, who refuses one, who insists on looking at the world through a guidebook rather than looking at it directly. Miss Lavish confiscating the Baedeker is a joke, but it is also the question the novel asks of everybody.
Class runs through every exchange. The Emersons are suspected of being socialists because they are generous without ceremony. Cecil's snobbery is the sharper version, dressed as taste. Underneath that sits the theme of freedom, and specifically a young woman's freedom to want something and admit it. Lucy spends much of the book editing herself for Charlotte, for Cecil, for her mother and for the version of herself she thinks she ought to be. Italy loosens that. Surrey tightens it again.
Why it still matters
The Modern Library placed A Room with a View 79th on its 1998 list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Merchant Ivory's 1985 film adaptation won awards and carried the story to a far larger audience. The comedy has aged well because Forster aims at a permanent target, which is the gap between what people feel and what they allow themselves to say. Anyone who has ever talked themselves out of a true answer will recognise Lucy. It is short, funny and more precise about social cowardice than most novels twice its length.
