A Room With A View, E.M. Forster
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Publisher: Penguin
Price: £7.99
A Room with a View, described by Forster as his happiest novel, is set around the vibrant and energetic city of Florence and so achieves this through its environment alone.
It charts the emancipation of Lucy Honeychurch, a repressed yet curious product of the 19th-century upper-middle class. The book depicts Lucy’s struggles to grow from indecision to fulfillment. Through the visual landscape and culture of Italy, Forster attempts to remove the shackles of ‘Englishness’ and suggest the possibilities of individual exploration and experience.
Lucy’s journey is encouraged by George Emerson, part of the social periphery, who represents freedom. Their relationship reflects the struggle between Victorian values and a new liberal outlook. George acts as a disarming influence on Lucy, encouraging her to break free from her enclosed world.
Yet Forster creates barriers to this in Lucy’s elderly spinster cousin and her fiancé, a consistent source of irritation and frustration to the unexpressed love of George and Lucy. This novel incorporates many of the characteristics of modern popular novels in its themes of love, struggle and self-expression.
