A Room with a View

About the book

Lucy Honeychurch visits Florence with her cousin Charlotte, expecting the pleasures of culture within the safeguards of proper behaviour. Encounters at their pension unsettle those arrangements, introducing people whose directness challenges the rules by which Lucy has learned to interpret herself. Back in England, familiar settings do not entirely restore familiar certainties. Forster uses conversations, social misunderstandings, music, and changing views to explore the tension between an acceptable account of a life and the feelings that account excludes. His comedy exposes the awkwardness of convention without making freedom a simple matter of ignoring others. Lucy's difficulty is partly a problem of recognition: she must find words for experiences that the people around her are eager to organise on her behalf.

• Self-discovery
• Social convention
• Travel and perception

Why read it

For a lucid social comedy in which setting and conversation quietly transform the heroine's choices.

English text