I received a $15 gift card as an appreciation from the Red Cross for donating blood and used the card to buy this novel from my local Barnes and Noble, a very nice Signature Edition from Union Square and Company publishers, which (it says on the back cover) “offers readers great works of literature in affordable, beautifully designed volumes.” At the time, I also had several books out from the library, so I read those first.

A Room With a View is Forster’s third published novel (1908) following Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). The excellent Howard’s End came next (1910). This was followed by a collection of short stories titled A Celestial Omnibus in 1911, and his masterpiece novel, A Passage to India in 1924, and another collection of short stories titled, The Eternal Moment in 1928. Held back by Forster from publication until after his death in 1970 due to their homosexual content was the novel Maurice, and a further collection of short stories titled The Life to Come.

A Room With a View unfolds in two parts. The first, slightly shorter, takes place in Florence, the second, in England.

In Florence, in Spring, at a pensione, we meet our principal character, Lucy Honeychurch. She is a young woman, passionate but constrained by English character and Edwardian social mores, being chaperoned on an Italian holiday by an older, unmarried, cousin, named Charlotte Bartlett. As the novel begins, the two women are complaining that they hadn’t received the rooms they were promised with a view of the Arno. They are overheard by a father and son named Emerson who do have rooms with a view and who volunteer to exchange with them. The other guests, two spinster sisters named Alan, a female novelist named Eleanor Lavish looking for inspiration, and a clergyman named Beebe, are shocked and amused by the situation.

Lucy goes out the next day to tour the city. Eleanor Lavish accompanies her but then abandons her when she runs into an old acquaintance. Lucy comes across the Emersons as they tour a church. They encourage her independence and to have her own opinions. Then follows another incident where Lucy has gone off by herself to buy postcards somewhere safe and close to the pensione when she encounters two Italian men arguing in a square. The argument turns violent. One of the men kills the other. Lucy faints. She’s rescued by George Emerson, the son. He helps her back to the pensione and although she is attracted to him and his kindness, she’s also made uncomfortable by the intimacy of their meeting and resolves to avoid him.

But avoid him, she cannot. The entire group later sets off on an excursion outside the city. While stopped in the hills to look at the view, Lucy slips down a small hill, landing in a sea of violets. George sees her and, overcome, kisses her, chastely, on the cheek.

Lucy and her cousin then go on to Rome and the first part ends.

Part two opens later that summer. We are at the home Lucy shares with her mother, Mrs. Honeychurch, and her younger, college-aged, brother, Freddy. In the opening scene, Lucy is outside in the garden where she is being proposed to by Cecil Vyse. We learn that Lucy had met Cecil in Rome and been proposed to him there, which she refused, and then proposed to again in northern Italy, which she also refused. All three proposals happen off stage so we aren’t sure what Cecil says, nor why, this third time, Lucy accepts.

But it’s clear, already at this point, from what we know of Lucy, and George, and Cecil, and of romance stories generally, that Lucy belongs with, and must be with the passionate George, not the stuffy Cecil. And of course, that is the way the story comes out. George Emerson and his father are brought back into the story when Cecil accidentally runs into them while they are looking at Italian paintings in the National Gallery and arranges for them to rent a cottage that has just become available in the same village where the Honeychurches live and where Mr. Beebe is the rector. Freddy, George Emerson, and Beebe go swimming in the local pond and while unclothed and behaving wildly are come upon by Cecil and Lucy and Mrs. Honeychurch. Later in the fall, the whole gang, including cousin Charlotte who has been invited up for the weekend, gather at the house and play tennis. Cecil is being a pill; instead of playing tennis he reads a novel, which he insists on reading aloud to show the others how bad it is. The novel turns out to be the one that Eleanor Lavish wrote after the trip to Florence and it contains a disguised version of the passionate scene of George kissing Lucy among the violets, a scene which Lucy had hoped to keep secret. Reminded of the episode, George again finds himself unable to control his ardor and when alone with Lucy for a moment, kisses her again.

Lucy determines to send George away, but when she confronts him he speaks, passionately, and longly for the first time. He tells Lucy that Cecil wants her only as an object on the shelf. Cecil doesn’t love her, can’t love her because he cares only for things, not people. George sees, moreover, that Lucy doesn’t love Cecil, either, but George loves her and he’s sure that Lucy loves him back, or would, if she would push off all the rules and social responsibilities that crowd her and be honest with herself.

Lucy goes so far as to break off her engagement with Cecil that very night, giving him a speech in which she echoes exactly the observations that George had made of the two of them earlier that afternoon. But neither can Lucy go so far as to unite with George. Hearing that the Alan sisters are now planning a trip to Greece and on to Constantinople, Lucy decides to flee with them, leaving Cecil, and George, and all men, and love, behind. She prepares for the excursion with a shopping trip with her mother in London. Then arriving back in her village that evening, they pick up Charlotte Bartlett in their carriage and together go to Mr. Beebe’s church for the evening service. While waiting for the older women, Lucy finds the senior Mr. Emerson in Beebe’s office. He and George are leaving the cottage they were renting and returning to London. Mr. Emerson finally makes Lucy see and admit that she loves George and that there is no sense in the two of them keeping apart.

There is a final chapter, an epilogue. It is spring again. The Alan sisters have gone to Greece alone. Lucy and George are together, romantically, at the same pensione in Florence where the story began. They have eloped. Charlotte Bartlett, who seemed to be doing everything possible throughout the novel to keep the lovers apart, is given a redemption when it turns out that she had noticed Mr. Emerson in the rectory of the church and rather than steering Lucy away from him had said nothing and allowed them to have the conversation which brought Lucy and George together.

The novel is charming. It’s sweet. It’s slight. It’s quite funny in places, especially at the beginning as the proper English people try to categorize each other about what “sort” they all are and whether to associate or avoid. Forster himself, as the narrator, intrudes here and there, as in when Lucy announces her engagement, “People congratulated Miss Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased her…” (p. 97). Forster gives every chapter both a number and a title, which are often droll, especially the comprehensive Chapter VI, which is titled, “The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them” and the succinct Chapter XII, which is titled simply, “Twelfth Chapter.” The plot hinges on coincidences that strain credulity, but that’s OK. There’s never really any suspense about whether Lucy and George will end up together, nor any drama as Cecil is drawn as such a prig, and although Forster actually gives us very little information about George, well, he isn’t Cecil and he’s the only other marriageable man in the cast.

As a Unitarian, I did laugh at the name Emerson. When Mrs. Honeychurch and Freddy first hear the name Emerson they wonder if they know the family and deciding that they don’t, Mrs. Honeychurch says, “I was only going to remark, Freddy, that I trusted they were no relations of Emerson the philosopher, a most trying man” (p. 114). But these Emerson’s are related to Mr. Emerson’s philosophy in that they reject the uptight forms of religion that disconnect humans from nature and from our own natures. Mr. Emerson, for instance, tells us that he refused to have his son George baptized in the church, though it upset his wife. There’s the crucial scene when George and Freddy and Mr. Beebe connect to their animal natures by swimming in the pond, like Walden pond, that Lucy and Freddy in childhood nicknamed The Sacred Lake. This, just after Freddy and George had noticed at the Emerson’s cottage that one of them had inscribed on a piece of furniture the line from Thoreau, “Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes” (p. 126). Mr. Emerson even seems to refer to Margaret Fuller when he speaks of an imagined future where men and women can be equal: “I tell you they shall be comrades, and George thinks the same” (p. 127)

It is that expansive “view” that Lucy seeks, and longs for throughout the novel. At the pensione in Florence a room with a view of the Arno , not the interior courtyard. And, clearly, Lucy and George are fated to be together because the first words from Mr. Emerson in the opening pages are “I have a view” followed by, “This is my son… his name’s George. He has a view, too” (p. 6). There’s the view from the hillside outside Florence that Lucy is admiring when she slips into the patch of violets and is rescued by George’s kiss. There’s a view mentioned several times from the Honeychurch home in the village situated up the side of a bluff, though meaningfully we’re told in the opening scene that the family prefers to keep the curtains closed to protect the furniture from the sun. Lucy looks for larger vistas, unencumbered by the walls that hem her in due to her sex, and her age, and the Edwardian age. Forster, as a gay man of the time, surely knew Lucy’s frustration.

George Emerson describes one other view, quoting his father when he says, “My father… says that there is only one perfect view–the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all those views on earth are but bungled copies of it” (p. 159). Cecil guesses that he’s referring to Dante, though it sounds like Plato to me. But George might as easily be quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, “The Oversoul” where Emerson writes, “As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.” The open view which allows us to see reality, both interior and exterior, is the salvation of Emerson’s transcendentalist spirituality, and the salvation Forster finally grants to his character, Lucy.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see other titles on my reading list, click here.