Reading Order
A Room with a View Reading Order
A Room with a View (1908) by E.M. Forster is the most sunlit and comic of his novels — a social comedy of Edwardian England that is also a genuine argument about the relationship between sexual instinct, social convention, and the possibility of a fully human life. Lucy Honeychurch, a young middle-class Englishwoman touring Italy with her chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, encounters the free-spirited George Emerson in Florence and is kissed by him unexpectedly among the violets on a hillside; the rest of the novel traces her return to England, her engagement to the aesthetically cultured but emotionally obtuse Cecil Vyse, her reunion with George, and her final choice between social propriety and personal truth. Forster wrote A Room with a View between 1901 and 1908, drawing on his own experience of Italy and his sense — developed most fully in his essay 'What I Believe' — that personal relationships and the quality of individual connection are the primary goods in a world whose public institutions have failed. The novel's Italy functions as a space of liberation — where English inhibitions temporarily dissolve and the body's instincts briefly prevail — while the English scenes dramatize the return of repression. Cecil Vyse, one of the funniest villains in English comic fiction (he is too aesthetic to be fully human, in the novel's terms), represents the kind of cultivated sterility that Forster most feared, while George Emerson and his eccentric father represent the possibility of a life lived with genuine openness to experience. A Room with a View ends in the most conventional romantic closure, but the lightness with which Forster achieves it is a kind of technical triumph.
Where to start
A Room with a View — the Italian section first, then the English section; the structure mirrors Lucy's movement between freedom and convention.
Complete A Room with a View Book List
- 1Buy
A Room with a View
E.M. Forster·1908·The novel — Lucy Honeychurch's choice between Cecil's cultivation and George's honesty. - 2Buy
Howards End
E.M. Forster·1910·Forster's major social novel — 'Only connect'; the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the clerk Leonard Bast. - 3Buy
A Passage to India
E.M. Forster·1924·Forster's final and greatest novel — British colonialism in India through the Marabar Caves incident. - 4Buy
Maurice
E.M. Forster·1971·Forster's novel of homosexual love, written 1913–14 but published posthumously — the fullest expression of A Room with a View's argument applied to a love society forbids. - 5Buy
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James·1881·James's masterpiece of a free American woman in Europe — the contrast to Forster's Lucy Honeychurch; where Lucy escapes her cage, Isabel Archer chooses hers. - 6Buy
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen·1818·Austen's most direct comic novel — another young woman in an unfamiliar landscape (Bath, a Gothic abbey) finding her way to the right man. - 7Buy
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton·1920·Wharton's novel of social convention and suppressed passion in Gilded Age New York — Forster's argument in an American context, with a far darker ending. - 8Buy
Where Angels Fear to Tread
E.M. Forster·1905·Forster's first novel — another English party in Italy, another collision between English convention and Italian passion, with a tragic outcome instead of a comic one.
A Room with a View — Frequently Asked Questions
What is A Room with a View about?
A Room with a View follows Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman touring Italy with her fussy chaperone Charlotte Bartlett, who encounters the unconventional George Emerson in Florence and is kissed by him unexpectedly on a Fiesolan hillside. Back in England, she becomes engaged to the aesthetically refined Cecil Vyse; when George Emerson coincidentally moves nearby, she is forced to confront her true feelings. The novel is a social comedy about the conflict between English social convention (represented by Charlotte and Cecil) and genuine feeling (represented by the Emersons and by Italy), ending when Lucy breaks her engagement and chooses George.
Who is Cecil Vyse and why does Forster dislike him?
Cecil Vyse is Lucy's fiancé — an upper-middle-class aesthete who knows and appreciates everything beautiful but is incapable of genuine human connection. He treats Lucy as an object to be cultivated and displayed rather than a person to be loved; he is condescending to social inferiors, obtuse to other people's feelings, and incapable of the openness to experience that Forster identifies with full humanity. Forster's narrator describes him memorably as 'medieval' — not a scholar or a knight, but 'the sort who was not there when needed, and who would take refuge in irony when he knew himself in the wrong.' Cecil is not malicious; he is, in the novel's terms, merely incomplete — a man whose cultivation has bypassed his humanity.
What is the significance of Italy in A Room with a View?
Italy in A Room with a View functions as a space where English social inhibitions temporarily dissolve and the body's instincts can briefly assert themselves — where Lucy can be kissed in a field of violets and not immediately know whether she is shocked or delighted. Forster draws on a long tradition of English writers using Italy as a foil for England's emotional repression (he was thinking of Ruskin and of his own Italian journeys), but he is also making a more specific argument: that the Mediterranean world's directness about passion and beauty represents something the English cultivate only in aestheticized, deadened form. The return to England is the return of repression; the novel's resolution requires Lucy to bring something of the Italian instinct back into English life rather than surrendering to English convention.
How does A Room with a View relate to Forster's other novels?
A Room with a View is the lightest and most comic of Forster's novels — the one that ends most unambiguously happily. Howards End (1910) treats the social themes more seriously and with a far more ambiguous resolution; A Passage to India (1924) engages colonialism and the limits of liberal good intentions with a tragic force that A Room with a View's sunlit comedy never attempts. Maurice, written 1913–14 but published posthumously in 1971, applies the same argument (that genuine feeling must triumph over social convention) to a homosexual love that Forster could not publicly endorse in his own time; it is in some sense the secret novel that A Room with a View's argument was always pointing toward.
What should I read after A Room with a View?
After A Room with a View, readers typically move to Forster's other novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), his first novel, which treats similar Italian themes with a tragic ending; Howards End (1910), his major social novel; and A Passage to India (1924), his final and greatest work. For the Edwardian comedy-of-manners tradition, H.G. Wells's comic novels (Kipps, 1905; Tono-Bungay, 1909) and P.G. Wodehouse (who began publishing at exactly this period) are natural companions. For the question of women's lives and social convention, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence are the major American parallels.
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