A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View concerns an adventurous young woman, Lucy Honeychurch, who falls in love with an idealistic lower-class man, George Emerson, earning her family’s disapproval. Both a social satire and a touching love story, A Room with a View is widely regarded as a major achievement of twentieth-century British fiction. In 1985, the novel was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film of the same title, starring Helena Bonham-Carter as Lucy. “Mr. Forster’s new novel is not only much the best of the three he has written, but it clearly admits him to the limited class of writers who stand above and apart from the manufacturers of contemporary fiction.”—Spectator. “It is packed with wonderful impressions and radiant sayings.”—Evening Standard. “This is one of the cleverest and most entertaining novels we have read for some time. The characters are as clear and salient as a portrait by Sargent, and there are many of them. One is continually moved to appreciative smiles by clever little touches of description and enlightenment. The story, too, is interesting and real.”—Daily Mail. “This odd title suggests a story rather out of the common, and it does not prove in the least misleading. The book is both original and delightful, presenting scenes of everyday life almost commonplace sometimes in their fidelity to nature, but chronicled in such a happy vein of quiet humour and with such penetrating observation as makes each little incident and dialogue a source of sheer joy to the reader. The characters are admirably drawn.”—Pall Mall Gazette. “We have originality and observation, and a book as clever as the other books that Mr. Forster has written already.”—Times. “Mr. Forster has earned the right to serious criticism. His work has revealed individuality, distinction, and a power of suggestion which opens large issues. ‘A Room with a View’ might stand for a title of all his work. There is a spirit of high comedy in it. Mr. Forster can describe with sure touch the queer satisfactions and still queerer repugnances which make up the strange region of modern things. Had this element been there alone, the book would have been merely an excellent satirical judgment of manners and conventions. Had the other elements stood alone—the revelation of the hidden life—it would have been mystical, intangible, illusory. By the fusion of the one with the other, he is able to present work humorous and arresting, with a curious element in it of compelling strength and emotion.”—Nation.