Worth Reading: A Room With a View
Cover via Amazon
A Room With a View by E. M. Forster (1908)
Five stars!
She joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.
A Room With a View is a charming love story and a wonderful introduction to Forster’s work. But it’s also a treatise in how to live. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, is a young woman with potential who hasn’t yet begun to live her life. In the first part of the book, she has traveled to Florence with her cousin and chaperon, Charlotte Bartlett, where she first witnesses a murder and then is kissed by George Emerson before an amazing view. The question is, will she allow these experiences to transform her?
In Part 2, Lucy has returned home to Windy Corner and Summer Street, where she becomes engaged to the insufferable Cecil Vyse. Lying to herself and everyone around her about her true feelings, as well as her unconscious desire to be an independent woman who is permitted to fully own those feelings, Lucy is in danger of becoming a member of the “vast armies of the benighted,” as Forster describes it. She is not true to either her head or her heart, and so marches along in a fugue state. Some people live their whole lives that way (hello, Charlotte!), which would be the greatest of tragedies, Forster implies.
Forster’s characters make this story come alive. Each one is a complex, real human being. The reader senses that, even while Forster gently pokes fun at all of his characters, he feels genuine affection toward them. And he allows them to surprise us. Even the ones we’ve dismissed as snobbish and insufferable are allowed to say something insightful or perform a compassionate act. And so they come to seem like real people to us, people we are glad to have known.
A Room With a View is worthy of a reading and a rereading. It is a book to make you both think and feel.
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It has been ages since I read this, I think it might be time to take it down from my shelf again!
I’m so glad you liked it. I read it for a British Lit course in university & loved it, especially the humour and how relatable the characters were, which is the true sign of a timeless piece of literature.