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 her meddling and fussy cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. The two ladies are upset that their rooms don't have a view of the Arno, but at dinner, a loud Englishman, Mr. Emerson, offers to switch rooms with them. After some awkward exchanges, the ladies finally agree to the deal. (Since this was the early 1900s, delicate things were not discussed and caused much embarrassment among gentlefolk.)Over the next few days, Lucy often crossed paths with George, Mr. Emerson's son, and during an outing to the country, George surprised her by kissing her passionately. While Lucy didn't realize it at the time, that kiss ended up changing her life.OK, I hate writing summaries of classic novels because it feels like I'm writing a high school book report, so I'm going to assume that anyone who takes the time to read this review is already familiar with the rest of the plot, thanks to the popularity of the Merchant-Ivory film. (Oh, how I loved that movie when I was young! It was definitely one of the things that set me on the path to becoming an anglophile.) If you are reading this review and don't know the rest of the story, well, golly, I'm not going to ruin it for you here!Besides being gorgeously written, this book is endearing for how Forster gave Lucy a chance to be her own person. There are several quotes about women that showed how progressive Forster was, and that was refreshing. Lucy was also so passionate about music that her parson was fond of saying he hoped she would learn to live as vibrantly as she played. When Lucy gets into a muddle over her whether or not to marry the uptight Cecil, she makes a grand speech about not wanting to be locked up, and wanting to have her own thoughts. Brava, Lucia! I loved this book so much that I will keep it on my shelf for future reads. Highly recommended. Now I need to reread Howard's End and see how that holds up.Funniest Quote by Cecil"All modern books are bad ... Every one writes for money in these days."Funniest Quote by Lucy's Mother"[N]othing roused Mrs. Honeychurch so much as literature in the hands of females. She would abandon every topic to inveigh against those women who (instead of minding their houses and their children) seek notoriety by print. Her attitude was: 'If books must be written, let them be written by men.'"Favorite Quotes"Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.""It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marveling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.""Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.""Life, so far as she troubled to conceive it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and identical foes. In this circle, one thought, married and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity for ever trying to enter, just as the London fog tries to enter the pinewoods pouring through the gaps in the northern hills. But, in Italy, where any one who chooses may warm himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant's olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to se you. She returned with new eyes.""A rebel she was, but not of the kind [Cecil] understood — a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions — her own soul.""[S]he reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an irruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gestures mean nothing, or mean too much."
I have not been known to spend my money on particularly pragmatic things. There was an heirloom apple tree native only to New England that I absolutely had to plant in my Midwestern garden. The old-tymey homemade ice cream maker that I vowed to use every summer, which ended up meaning one summer, the very summer I received it, used it, and stored it. But one day, with any extra cash lying about, I would love to sponsor a study at a statistical research institute about love triangles. Mostly about the verisimilitude of love triangles. Walk into a library and select a novel at random, and I’d bet your chances of picking up a book with a love triangle inside hover around 33%. But in real life, not Literature, does the population have a lifetime love triangle percentage of 33%? I doubt it, and yet, in books, those creative factories meant to mimic, comment, and critique “real life” insist on this romantic concept. Love triangles everywhere, love triangles abound! E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View is not an exception.Why does this authorial obsession for love triangles exist? For one thing, it might not be an entirely authorial preoccupation but also readerly: writers can say all they want about Art, but they are almost always just giving us what we want. Love triangles are schematics. An easy way to capture a complex thing. So here, the three-sided polygon between Lucy, George, and Cecil is about the future. Cecil is labeled “medieval” which makes George the “modern” man. It’s up to the woman to decide which way the wind is blowing—forward? Or backward? Cecil can promise her a cloistered life like her mother lived; she will live happily but in the background. Life will unfold like a masterwork painting before her eyes. George can promise very little except for one very big thing: the possibility to step into the painting and become a masterpiece herself. It’s a really clever book and somehow manages to dismantle the manic pixie dreamgirl trope way back in 1908, that is, 97 years before the facile term was coined. So it’s even more impressive in its own historical context. For a good chunk of the novel, I was unsure if I was reading a deeply sexist book or a deeply feminist book. All becomes clear by the end, in fact, if not for the final chapter, this could have entered the annals of feminist literature.Yet I’m surprised to see that some readers sighed over this like a true romance. Forster’s sardonic, detached narrator made such a reading impossible for me. Instead of presenting the facts through Lucy’s loveshocked eyes, he allows us to experience the events at a distance. It is worth noting that this distance is undoubtedly located above: the narrator and reader are above Lucy; we see her faults while she fails to. This choice creates an interesting effect, indeed, an effect at odds with the early feminist message Forster otherwise promotes. Again and again, Lucy says that only women can speak for women and that her thoughts, far from being ideas projected on to her by men, truly exist. Thus her back-and-forth between the two suitors is an attempt to find independence in the midst of a marriage that will undeniably rest upon dependence. She, not a man, will speak for her own hand. But Forster’s superior narrator who suspends us just above the intrigue, dangling like a chandelier in the English parlor at teatime, allows us to observe and share in his judgments (I use “his” because there is no question that Forster’s narrator, mostly an authorial stand-in, is male). The consequence being that even as women exit the Victorian era and claim greater autonomy, even in a novel that celebrates this social change, they remain objects of Art, decorous and meaningful, so long as this meaning is recognized and capitalized by a man. In short, an imperfect, funny little book that undermines itself.
What do You think about A Room With A View (2005)?
Certainly a different take than my first foray into Forster (The Machine Stops). I was expecting the stereotypical English romance novel, and was surprised at where this actually went. An excellent study into social conflicts at the time, a relatively complicated topic, and yet Forster managed to use relatively simple prose (but still retaining its beauty) to paint Lucy's internal struggle for the love between two men. I'm not the biggest fan of novels dedicated to tales of love, especially when it involves the upper class, but this was a pleasant book to read over a couple afternoons. It's a pity the apartment I'm at on my balcony only has a view of the CBD, but at least it's a view!
—Capsguy
Every so often, when I am facing a particularly difficult crisis in my life, one of the classic novels I read as a child rises to the surface of my mind, and I am comforted by the memory of the wisdom that novel instilled in me. Such was the case today with A Room With a View. Forster had a tendency to be a bit of a tiresome moralizer such that, even though I am inclined to agree with the moral and political views with which he stuffed his more "serious" novels Howard's End and A Passage to India, I find little pleasure in rereading them. The only Forster novel I really enjoy rereading time and again is A Room With a View because it is such a delightfully airy confection of wit and romance, lightly tinted by Forster's heavy moral opinions but not weighed down by them. In A Room With a View, it is Forster's flawless style -- deliciously witty, elegant, and eloquent in that quintessentially English manner that few twentieth-century novelists besides Forster and Waugh achieved -- that is allowed to shine. The book is a small masterpiece: despite its short length, the minor characters -- for example, Lucy Honeychurch's hilarious teenage brother Freddy -- come alive as living-and-breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings with piquant verbal mannerisms that the reader quickly comes to love.Here is the passage from A Room With a View that resurfaced in my brain today -- idea-rich, memorably original, and wise in that conceptually simple yet innovative way that makes you wonder why no one had ever thought of putting things quite that way before:[Lucy] made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. [Mr. Emerson] heard her in silence, and then said: "My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me"—dreamily; she was not alarmed—"that you are in a muddle."She shook her head."Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror—on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.""Beware of muddle." How simple it sounds, and yet how hard! It is not Death or Fate that causes Lucy to kiss gentle George one moment and then enter an engagement with snooty Cecil the next. These kinds of happenings cannot be blamed on Evil, or on Destiny. Most of the time, those capitalized words play no great role in the daily workings of our lives: the majority of people are well-intentioned, and the universe itself is not actively malevolent. It is muddles, then, in which we find ourselves caught to our dismay, and it is only personal courage that can get us out of them.ETA: Skimming the negative reviews of A Room With a View that other readers have posted on Goodreads, I notice that a lot of readers gave this book low ratings because they expected it to be a satisfying romance with a male lead character who is as well-developed as the female lead character. But I think it's all well and good that George's character is not as fully developed as Lucy's character: after all, in a way, George is beside the point, just as Robert Lebrun in Kate Chopin's The Awakening is beside the point -- If Robert hadn't up-ended Edna Pontellier's life, eventually someone else would have. It seems many people are bothered by the fact that this novel isn't quite a traditional romance, but it isn't quite a feminist manifesto, either: it's just a novel about one girl choosing the life that's best for her (NOT the life that's best for all women, or for all people). If you don't go in expecting it to be something it's not, you'll like this novel just fine.
—Jenna
Away with yerself, Liam. There's nothing weird about a woman after looking for a bit of bodice ripping romance. Cecil wouldn't know a bodice if aul Mr Bebbe romped up the aisle in one for Evensong!
—Maggie
