A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

First published: 1908

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: Early twentieth century

Locale: Florence, Italy; Surrey, England

Principal characters

• Miss Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman
• Miss Charlotte Bartlett, her cousin and chaperone
• Mr. Emerson, an Englishman
• George Emerson, his son
• The Reverend Arthur Beebe, an acquaintance of Lucy
• Mrs. Honeychurch, Lucy’s mother
• Freddy Honeychurch, Lucy’s brother
• Cecil Vyse, Lucy’s fiancé
• Miss Catherine Alan, a guest at the Pension Bertolini
• Miss Teresa Alan, her sister
• Miss Eleanor Lavish, a novelist

The Story:

Lucy Honeychurch and Charlotte Bartlett are disappointed by the Pension Bertolini, where they are staying in Florence, and by the fact that their rooms have no view. They are embarrassed at dinner at the pension when Mr. Emerson offers for himself and his son to exchange rooms with the two women, as their rooms have a view. Lucy and Charlotte’s unhappiness decreases when the Reverend Arthur Beebe, whom they had known previously, and who has been appointed rector of Lucy’s home parish, joins them at dinner. After dinner, he manages to convince Charlotte that the exchange of rooms will not put the women under any obligation to the Emersons. The change, although effected, merely confirms Charlotte’s opinion that the Emersons are ill-bred.

At Santa Croce Church, Lucy meets the Emersons, who guide her to the Giotto frescoes that she has come to see. She finds that she is more at ease with Mr. Emerson than she had expected to be, although she is confused by his rejection of artistic and religious cant and his concern about his son.

Late one afternoon, Lucy declares that she is going for a walk alone. She buys some photographs of paintings that she has seen and then walks through the Piazza Signoria. As she does so, she passes two men who are arguing over a debt. One stabs the other, and the stricken man, bleeding from the mouth, dies at her feet. At that moment, she sees George Emerson watching from across the square. As he reaches her side, she faints. After she has recovered, she sends him to get her photographs, which she had dropped. Disturbed because they are covered with blood, he tosses them into the Arno on the way home. When Lucy asks why he has thrown the pictures away, he is forced to tell her. He feels that something very significant has happened to him in the piazza. Lucy and George stop near the pension, and Lucy leans beside him over a parapet and asks him to tell no one that he had been there. Perturbed by their enforced intimacy, she is puzzled and amazed when George says that the murder has made him want to live.

In a large party, the visitors at the pension, together with a resident English chaplain, drive toward Fiesole. Lucy, excluded from Miss Lavish’s conversation with Charlotte, asks one of the drivers to direct her to the clergyman. Instead, he leads her to George. Lucy finds at the end of a path a terrace covered with violets. While she stands there, radiant with joy at the beauty of the place, George steps forward and kisses her. Charlotte, whom neither Lucy nor George had seen at first, calls to her cousin to return to the group.

Charlotte tells Lucy that George is a cad and that obviously he is accustomed to stealing kisses. She takes advantage of Lucy’s need for sympathy to indicate that George’s way of life, as she sees it, is merely brutal. In the morning, Lucy and Charlotte leave the pension, taking the train for Rome.

Back at her home in Surrey, England, Lucy becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, whom she had visited in Rome. When Mr. Beebe comes to the house for tea, he is perturbed by the news of the engagement. Returning from a party with Lucy and Mrs. Honeychurch, Cecil notices a pair of ugly villas that have been put up by a local builder. When the village residents become alarmed as they consider what type of person might rent the villas, they are assured that Sir Harry Otway has bought them and intends to lease them only to suitable tenants. Lucy suggests that the sisters Miss Catherine Alan and Miss Teresa Alan, whom she met in Florence, would be such tenants. After seeing the villas, Cecil and Lucy walk on through the woods. By a pond where Lucy had bathed as a child, Cecil, for the first time, asks if he might kiss her. Their embrace is not successful and only reminds Lucy of the Emersons, whom she then mentions to Cecil.

Shortly before the Misses Alans’s occupancy has been arranged, Cecil meets the Emersons in London and suggests that they take one of the villas. Not connecting the father and son with Lucy, he hopes thereby to disrupt the local social order. After the Emersons have moved into their house, Mr. Beebe takes Lucy’s brother, Freddy Honeychurch, to meet them. The boy immediately asks George to go swimming with him. Together with Mr. Beebe, they strip off their clothes and swim and race happily at the pond in the woods. There Lucy, out walking with her mother and Cecil, comes upon George again. Although he greets her joyously, she bows stiffly and moves on.

While George is visiting the Honeychurch house one Sunday, Cecil, who is also visiting, loftily refuses to play tennis. Lucy, George, Freddy, and a friend of Freddy play while Cecil reads. After the game, Cecil reads aloud to the group from the novel he has been reading. Written by Miss Lavish, it contains a scene describing George and Lucy’s kiss. Cecil is ignorant of the fact that the scene depicts them, but George and Lucy are profoundly moved. On the way into the house, George again kisses Lucy. Charlotte is staying in the house at the time, and Lucy is furious that Charlotte has betrayed what she saw in Italy to Miss Lavish. She speaks to Charlotte, and then together they go to George, and Lucy asks him to leave. Before he obeys, he tells Lucy that he loves her and that it would be disastrous for her to marry Cecil, who is incapable of intimacy with anyone.

Although she denies to herself that she is attracted to George, Lucy breaks her engagement to Cecil that evening. In the meantime, Mr. Beebe receives a letter from the Misses Alan, who are planning to visit Athens. To escape her confusion, Lucy decides that she must go with them, and Charlotte joins Mr. Beebe in persuading Mrs. Honeychurch to let Lucy go. Lucy, afraid that George will hear of her rejection of Cecil and return to see her, hopes in this manner to avoid another meeting with him.

As Lucy and her mother are returning from a day in London, Charlotte meets them as she is coming out of Mr. Beebe’s house and asks them to go with her to church. Lucy declines and goes into Mr. Beebe’s house to await their return. There she finds Mr. Emerson in the library. George, feeling utterly lost, has gone to London. Lucy finally admits that she is not going to marry Cecil, but when Mr. Emerson reveals his intuitive knowledge that she loves George, she becomes angry and weeps. Although she gradually perceives that all he has said is true, she is upset at the prospect of distressing everyone afresh if she acts on her new knowledge. Strengthened by Mr. Emerson’s passion, sincerity, and confidence, however, she promises to attempt to live the truth she has learned.

With her family opposing the marriage, but not insistently, Lucy marries George. They spend their honeymoon at the Pension Bertolini, where they wonderingly realize that, subconsciously, Charlotte had been on their side. She had known that Mr. Emerson was in Mr. Beebe’s house, and she also must have realized how he would speak to Lucy when they met there.

Bibliography

Bradshaw, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of essays presents analyses of various aspects of Forster’s life and work, including discussions of Forster’s depictions of women, Forsterian sexuality, and postcolonial Forster.

Dowling, David. Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Includes discussion of A Room with a View that demonstrates the iconographic significance of the paintings mentioned in the novel and analyzes the change that Lucy Honeychurch undergoes through her meetings with the Emersons.

Edwards, Mike. E. M. Forster: The Novels. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Shows how analysis of four of Forster’s novels—A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India, and The Longest Journey—can help readers to understand his treatment of characters, locations, relationships, and other aspects of these works. Also examines Forster’s life and provides examples of how four literary critics have approached Forster’s writing.

Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. 1978. Reprint. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Definitive biography is detailed, well written, and copiously illustrated. Demonstrates how a trip Forster made to Florence in late 1901 inspired him to attempt a novel about English tourists in Italy. Recounts his subsequent struggles in writing A Room with a View and summarizes the novel’s critical reception.

Land, Stephen K. Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E. M. Forster. New York: AMS Press, 1990. Explains how A Room with a View fits into a pattern established by Forster’s other novels by positioning Lucy as the heroine, Charlotte and Cecil as villains, George as a challenger, and Miss Lavish as a “rebel woman.” Argues that the novel’s conclusion is unsatisfying.

Medalie, David. E. M. Forster’s Modernism. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Examines the relationship of Forster’s writings to modernism, analyzing his works to demonstrate their modernist elements. Places Forster’s work within the context of early twentieth century social, political, and aesthetic developments.

Rosecrance, Barbara. Forster’s Narrative Vision. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. Analyzes the quirky narrative voice in A Room with a View and concludes that its effects on a reader are primarily comic; points out that the voice functions as a type of stage manager.