Wit and intelligence are the hallmarks of this probing portrait of the English character. In this story of extreme contrasts -- in values, social class, and cultural perspectives -- an unconventional romantic relationship leads to conventional happiness in a delightful social comedy.
While touring Italy with her overbearing cousin, well-bred Lucy Honeychurch falls in love with handsome but unsuitable George Emerson, only to become engaged to haughty Cecil Vyse. But Lucy is lured away from the conventions of upper-middle-class Edwardian society by her yearnings for the clerk she left behind. A Room with a View satirizes the English notion of respectability -- and remains Forster's most beloved novel and a twentieth-century classic.
"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Description:
Wit and intelligence are the hallmarks of this probing portrait of the English character. In this story of extreme contrasts -- in values, social class, and cultural perspectives -- an unconventional romantic relationship leads to conventional happiness in a delightful social comedy. While touring Italy with her overbearing cousin, well-bred Lucy Honeychurch falls in love with handsome but unsuitable George Emerson, only to become engaged to haughty Cecil Vyse. But Lucy is lured away from the conventions of upper-middle-class Edwardian society by her yearnings for the clerk she left behind. A Room with a View satirizes the English notion of respectability -- and remains Forster's most beloved novel and a twentieth-century classic."But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?