"A Room with a View," E.M. Forster

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

July 23, 2022

 

“In her heart also there were springing up strange desires.”

                                                                                                                                       E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

                                                                                                                                       A Room with a View, 1908

 

The story opens in Florence, early in the first decade of the 20^th Century. Like today, Florence was then a favorite tourist destination, especially among the English middle classes. It was a room with a view of the Arno that Charlotte Bartlett (“…greatly troubled over things that did not matter...”) and her niece Lucy Honeychurch (“…I do so always hope that people will be nice.”) wanted at the Pension Bartolini. 

 

Their complaint is overheard by one of the pension’s guests, Mr. Emerson (“one of the ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad”) who offers his and his son George’s rooms: “Women like looking at a view, men don’t.” The meeting is fortuitous, as it is the relationship between George and Lucy that concerns the author.

 

Other characters we meet are the Reverend Arthur Beebe, who “…loved to study the maiden ladies; they were his specialty;” the Reverend Cuthbert Eager “who suffered from an over-fluent tongue rather than a resolute will,” and Cecil Vyse: “He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seemed braced square…, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision.” When we meet him. he is engaged to Lucy. Others we get to know include Lucy’s widowed mother and nineteen-year-old brother, and author Mrs. Lavish whose soon-to-be-published novel will play an unintended role.

 

Forster, most famous for A Passage to India and Howard’s End, writes humorously of the snobbishness and hypocrisy of England’s upper middle classes at the turn of the last century: “An Italian’s ignorance is sometimes more remarkable than his knowledge.” “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice…” “They that marry do well, but they that refrain do better.” The last quote spoken by the unmarried Mr. Beebe, reflects, perhaps, the never-married Mr. Forster, who was homosexual at a time when such practice was kept secret.             

 

Having moved back to Surrey, the story ends as the reader expects, with Lucy having thrown off Cecil: “The scales fell from Lucy’s eyes. How had she stood Cecil for a moment? He was intolerable.” Convention had prevented Lucy from showing her love for George, though she loved him and he her. Ironically, it was George’s father (her future father-in-law) that shows Lucy the value of love: “He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.” 

 

This is a short book, at 168 pages in my edition almost a novelette. While it was written over a hundred years ago by a man who grew up in Victorian England, there is nothing dated about his opining humorously and insightfully on human foibles and sentiments. A wonderful read.