A Room with a View

E.M. Forster published A Room with a View in 1908, and it remains the most immediately pleasurable of his novels-lighter than Howards End, less politically charged than A Passage to India, possessed of a comic ease that occasionally disguises the seriousness of its social observation. It is a novel about the relationship between convention and vitality, between the England that represses and the Italy that liberates, and it conducts its argument with a charm that never becomes complacency.

Lucy Honeychurch is in Florence with her elder cousin Charlotte Bartlett when she meets the Emersons-Mr. Emerson, a hearty agnostic, and his son George, who kisses her in a field of violets above Florence and forces a response she spends the rest of the novel trying to repress. Back in Surrey, she becomes engaged to the aesthetically correct but emotionally arid Cecil Vyse, while George’s reappearance keeps disturbing the managed surface of her life.

Forster’s satire of Edwardian social convention is gentle but precise. Charlotte Bartlett, who spends the novel behaving decorously while ensuring that things turn out according to her secret wishes, is a comic masterpiece of a character-a portrait of social manipulation so complete it barely registers as satire. Cecil Vyse, who loves Lucy without seeing her, is another: the aesthete who has substituted connoisseurship for feeling.

The novel’s Italy is idealized in ways that Forster, a more complex thinker in his later work, would not have permitted himself. But the idealization serves the argument: Italy is not a real place in this novel but a symbol of the warmth and directness that English social life forbids, and the book’s comedy and its poignancy both depend on that symbolic weight.