A Room with a View

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by E. M. Forster, set in Italy and England, and it works as both a love story and a comic examination of English manners at the start of the twentieth century. The book contrasts the constraints of Edwardian society with the freedom Lucy Honeychurch glimpses on a holiday in Florence.

The party at the Pensione Bertolini includes the novelists and tourists Lucy had not expected, among them a father and son named Emerson whose directness offends her cousin and unsettles her. Lucy returns to England engaged to Cecil Vyse, a man of taste who treats her as a work of art he has acquired, and the arrival of the Emersons in her own neighbourhood puts her back into the argument she thought she had left in Italy.

Forster wrote the novel from his own experience of travel in Italy, and the Italian scenes are written with a warmth the English ones deliberately lack. The comedy depends on small social transactions, and the book's resolution turns on Lucy's willingness to say what she wants out loud rather than on any external event.