Love is in the air--or maybe anxiously repressed--in February and my romantic literature jag begins with A Room with a View, the 1908 novel by E.M. Forster. Like a candy store, this book offers a bounty of treats that I found irresistible. There's a holiday in Italy. There's a boarding house with much ado. There are young lovers Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson. There are bridges, summer storms and a hillside covered in great blue violets. There's a return to the heroine's home in Surrey, Eng...

4.5 stars"Italians are born knowing the way. It would seem that the whole earth lay before them, not as a map, but as a chess-board, whereon they continually behold the changing pieces as well as the squares. Any one can find places, but the finding of people is a gift from God."Ah, there is nothing like a vacation to rest the body and soothe one’s soul… well, this would be the ideal holiday in any case. Family trips to Disney World would not fall in this category. Nor would my latest adventures...

A Room with a View by E. M. ForsterA novel of manners by a master. It is set in England in the early 1900’s -- the Edwardian era. As we are told in the introduction, D. H. Lawrence wrote “About social existence, E. M. Forster knew everything.” Christopher Isherwood called him the expert on “My England.” If we switched the setting to the USA, I would think I was reading Edith Wharton. Or Henry James without the subclauses. We start off with a young upper-middle class British woman visiting Floren...

I'm a sucker for a sweet, kind-hearted, naïve and sheltered heroine. Especially when they slowly learn how to be brave. So this book was perfect for me to read.Lucy Honeychurch (how's that for a name) is a sheltered young Englishwoman in 1908. She lives with her mother and little brother Freddy. She goes on an exciting travel-abroad trip with her stuffy older cousin. There she meets the Emersons - also English - old Mr. Emerson who is loving and honest to a fault. His outspoken ways are consider...

The Pensione (pension) Bertolini in Florence, Italy has everything for the visiting tourists, Miss Lucy Honeychurch and her older poorer cousin Charlotte Bartlett a rather overbearing chaperon, fine food, (not really) wines not too bad this is Italy and a room with a view. Unfortunately not for the cousins, their promised accommodations went to Mr.Emerson and his quiet gloomy son George. If you can't trust the Signora Bertolini, the Italian owner of this establishment more English than one in Lo...

A Room with a View, E.M. ForsterA Room with a View is a 1908 novel, by British writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman, in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society, at the beginning of the 20th century.Part one: The first part of the novel is set in Florence, Italy, and describes a young English woman's first visit to Florence, at a time when upper middle class English women were starting t...

3.5I am in a classics mood, but after my recent completion of War and Peace I decided to try something a little lighter and less than one tenth of the size. This is how I found my way towards E. M. Forster's 130 page novel about a woman who is forced to make a decision between marrying a wealthy man she will never love and a man of lower class who she knows she can be happy with. Funnily enough, I think it was this story's length that slightly let it down for me, had it been a longer book I'm su...

No Room with No View (2020 Edition) "They had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. We were promised south rooms with a view close together, instead of which we have no rooms, with no view, and are unable to even enter the country. Oh, Lucy." "I should have liked to see the dolphins now swimming in the Venice canals," said Lucy (she hadn't yet read the article saying this was not true). "But perhaps it's for the best, given--" But Lucy decided it was wiser not to bring...

Romantic comedy this is not. The rosiness of a woman stumbling upon convenient fantasy fulfillment by marrying into privilege and bourgeois wealth do not tinge the themes of this classic. Rather this aspires to the novelty of a sort of female bildungsroman. A woman who is roused into the acknowledgement of her desires and self through the unwitting intervention of men considered unworthy of being even good travel companions - how many male authors/poets/dramatists of Forster's generation have ca...

There is a great line in A Room with a View about a book that has been abandoned in a garden: The garden was deserted except for a red book, which lay sunning itself upon the gravel path. The author then describes what the main characters are doing in various locations adjacent to the garden, but meanwhile the red book is allowed to be caressed all the morning by the sun and to raise its covers slightly, as though to acknowledge the caress. The description of the book seems very innocent but the...

It was Phaethon who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master's horse up the stony hill.Fiesole, in the hills northeast of Firenze 9/2/2007I read this lovely little novel about three months after taking the picture above. I was so thrilled that I had actually been in Florence, where a part of the story takes place. The "main event" of the Florence episode occurs when the English ladies take a chaperoned carriage ride into the hi...

What happens in Florence, stays in Florence.Unless this is the early 1900's and you're visiting the city with your annoying spinster cousin, then you kiss some boy in a field of violets for like two seconds and nobody ever lets you forget it. Jeez, people. This is a brief, sweet little novel about Lucy Honeychurch (winner of the prestigious award for Most Adorable Name Ever), who goes to Florence with previously-mentioned spinster cousin. Despite lack of A ROOM WITH A VIEW, Lucy has a very nice

E.M. Forster had me sighing with pleasure as I read A Room with a View for the very first (but certainly not the last) time when I was a naive teenager. I also loved the 1985 film adaptation with Helena Bonham-Carter. (I've watched bits of the 2008 Masterpiece Theatre version starring Elaine Cassidy, but only Sinead Cusack's performance held my interest. The 2008 version was not very good, and the screenwriter changed the ending! Sacrilege!) The 1985 movie had a stellar cast, remained pretty fa...

Considered by many to be Forster's sunny day, and most optimistic novel, would start off in Italy, an Inn in Florence to be precise. Two sweet Edwardian females, Miss Lucy Honeychurch (adorable name) and her cousin, Charlotte the chaperone have a bit of a dilemma whilst holidaying, the silly Inn keeper promised them rooms with a view looking out onto the Arno River, but they end up facing the courtyard. (I would have gladly faced the courtyard if it meant being a Tuscan tourist, would have even

Edwardian-era propriety meets Italian passion with entertaining results in E.M. Forster’s sunny, slight, but ever so charming comedy of manners. Well-known from the sumptuous Merchant-Ivory adaptation (which I rewatched immediately after finishing the book), the novel tells the story of Lucy Honeychurch, a proper English girl who, while on vacation in Florence with her cousin/chaperone, Miss Bartlett, meets George Emerson, a handsome but odd philosophical soul, who’s travelling with his eccentri...

A Room with a View is a story of love; a story of self-realization of a young woman; and a story of the Edwardian English society still governed by strict Victorian values. This is my first experience with E.M. Forster and I’m well rewarded. Written at the beginning of the Edwardian era, Forster critically exposes the cultural restrictions, class differences, and rigidly maintained social status that had swallowed the English society. The story is set up in England and Italy and Forster with his...

"She knew that the intruder was ill-bred, even before she glanced at him." -Charlotte Bartlett.I was reminded of this, an old favourite of mine, when a Goodreads' review of the book, by @Apatt, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... had me instantly searching bookshelves for my own battered copy.E. M. Forster writes in a way that would seem archaic now (natch), but the same codes of conduct and social divisions still apply in our modern age.In pre-WWI England, travel to sunny Euro destinati

“Has Italy filled you with the fever of travel ? Perhaps George Emerson is right . He says that Italy is only a euphuism for Fate .”I have the author Sarah Winman to thank for my finally reading this book. One of the characters in her upcoming novel Still Life which I just finished, tells of her knowing E.M. Forster and the book is read by a character in the novel. While this is a social commentary on Victorian England in many ways, it’s an ode to Florence and it’s art, to Italy and how full of

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster is a 2017 Amazon Classics publication. ( Originally published in 1908)In the continuing saga of 'taming the TBR', I have found it easier to locate classics on my list that I have been meaning to read for years. The brevity of this one convinced me to make time for it immediately instead of letting it continue to gather 'virtual' dust on my Kindle. I had a little trouble with this one- in fact- I almost gave up on it. I was well over halfway in before I felt eng...

I was overjoyed to discover that this book I had liked when I was in high school was even more charming and lovely than I remembered.I'm not sure what impelled me to suddenly reread this novel about a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, whose life is transformed after she visits Italy, but I'm glad I did. Forster's language is so inviting and engaging that as soon as I started reading, I didn't want to put down the book. The story opens at a hotel in Florence, and Lucy is being chaperoned by h...