![A Room with a View](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
![A Room with a View](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781974996018 |
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Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
Publication date: | 11/27/2018 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 225 |
Sales rank: | 355,792 |
File size: | 1 MB |
Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
![About The Author](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
Date of Birth:
January 1, 1879Date of Death:
June 7, 1970Place of Birth:
LondonPlace of Death:
Coventry, EnglandEducation:
B. A. in classics, King's College, Cambridge, 1900; B. A. in history, 1901; M.A., 1910Read an Excerpt
"The Signora had no business to do it," said Miss Bartlett, "no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!"
"And a Cockney, besides!" said Lucy, who had been further saddened by the Signora's unexpected accent. "It might be London." She looked at the two rows of English people who were sitting at the table; at the row of white bottles of water and red bottles of wine that ran between the English people; at the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framed; at the notice of the English church (Rev. Cuthbert Eager, M.A. Oxon.), that was the only other decoration of the wall.
"Charlotte, don't you feel, too, that we might be in London? I can hardly believe that all kinds of other things are just outside. I suppose it is one's being so tired."
"This meat has surely been used for soup," said Miss Bartlett, laying down her fork."I want so to see the Arno. The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The. Signora had no business to do it at all. Oh, it is a shame!"
"Any nook does for me," Miss Bartlett continued; "but it does seem hard that you shouldn't have a view."
Lucy felt that she had been selfish. "Charlotte, you mustn't spoil me: of course, you must look over the Arno, too. I meant that. The first vacant room in the front'"
"You must have it," said Miss Bartlett, part of whose travelling expenseswere paid by Lucy's mother'a piece of generosity to which she made many a tactful allusion.
"No, no. You must have it."
"I insist on it. Your mother would never forgive me, Lucy.""She would never forgive me."
The ladies' voices grew animated, and if the sad truth be owned a little peevish. They were tired, and under the guise of unselfishness they wrangled. Some of their neighbours interchanged glances, and one of them'one of the ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad'leant forward over the table and actually intruded into their argument. He said:"I have a view, I have a view."
Miss Bartlett was startled. Generally at a pension people looked them over for a day or two before speaking, and often did not find out that they would "do" till they had gone. She knew that the intruder was ill-bred, even before she glanced at him. He was an old man, of heavy build, with a fair, shaven face and large eyes. There was something childish in those eyes, though it was not the childishness of senility. What exactly it was Miss Bartlett did not stop to consider, for her glance passed on to his clothes. These did not attract her. He was probably trying to become acquainted with them before they got into the swim. So she assumed a dazed expression when he spoke to her, and then said: "A view? Oh, a view! How delightful a view is!"
"This is my son," said the old man; "his name's George. He has a view too.""Ah," said Miss Bartlett, repressing Lucy, who was about to speak."What I mean," he continued, "is that you can have our rooms, and we'll have yours. We'll change."The better class of tourist was shocked at this, and sympathized with the newcomers. Miss Bartlett, in reply, opened her mouth as little as possible, and said:
"Thank you very much indeed; that is out of the question.""Why?" said the old man, with both fists on the table."Because it is quite out of the question, thank you.""You see, we don't like to take'" began Lucy.Her cousin again repressed her.
"But why?" he persisted. "Women like looking at a view; men don't." And he thumped with his fists like a naughty child, and turned to his son, saying, "George, persuade them!"
"It's so obvious they should have the rooms, " said the son. "There's nothing else to say."
He did not look at the ladies as he spoke, but his voice was perplexed and sorrowful. Lucy, too, was perplexed; but she saw that they were in for what is known as "quite a scene," and she had an odd feeling that whenever these ill-bred tourists spoke the contest widened and deepened till it dealt, not with rooms and views, but with well, with something quite different, whose existence she had not realized before. Now the old man attacked Miss Bartlett almost violently: Why should she not change? What possible objection had she? They would clear out in half an hour.
Miss Bartlett, though skilled in the delicacies of conversation, was powerless in the presence of brutality. It was impossible to snub any one so gross. Her face reddened with displeasure. She looked around as much as to say, "Are you all like this?" And two little old ladies, who were sitting further up the table, with shawls hanging over the backs of the chairs, looked back, clearly indicating "We are not; we are genteel."
"Eat your dinner, dear," she said to Lucy, and began to toy again with the meat that she had once censured.
Lucy mumbled that those seemed very odd people opposite."Eat your dinner, dear. This pension is a failure. Tomorrow we will make a change."
Hardly had she announced this fell decision when she reversed it. The curtains at the end of the room parted, and revealed a clergyman, stout but attractive, who hurried forward to take his place at the table, cheerfully apologizing for his lateness. Lucy, who had not yet acquired decency, at once rose to her feet, exclaiming: "Oh, oh! Why, it's Mr. Beebe! Oh, how perfectly lovely! Oh, Charlotte, we must stop now, however bad the rooms are. Oh!"Miss Bartlett said, with more restraint:
"How do you do, Mr. Beebe? I expect that you have forgotten us: Miss Bartlett and Miss Honeychurch, who were at Tunbridge Wells when you helped the Vicar of St. Peter's that very cold Easter."
Table of Contents
Part 1 | ||
The Bertolini | 1 | |
In Santa Croce with No Baedeker | 16 | |
Music, Violets, and the Letter "S" | 35 | |
Fourth Chapter | 49 | |
Possibilities of a Pleasant Outing | 57 | |
The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them | 73 | |
They Return | 88 | |
Part 2 | ||
Mediaeval | 105 | |
Lucy as a Work of Art | 124 | |
Cecil as a Humourist | 142 | |
In Mrs. Vyse's Well-Appointed Flat | 153 | |
Twelfth Chapter | 161 | |
How Miss Bartlett's Boiler Was So Tiresome | 173 | |
How Miss Lucy Faced the External Situation Bravely | 184 | |
The Disaster Within | 192 | |
Lying to George | 210 | |
Lying to Cecil | 221 | |
Lying to Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy, and the Servants | 229 | |
Lying to Mr. Emerson | 250 | |
The End of the Middle Ages | 271 |
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
In a journal entry from July, 1910, E. M. Forster wrote, "However gross my desires, I find that I shall never satisfy them for the fear of annoying others. I am glad to come across this much good in me. It serves instead of purity." Although Forster wrote this passage some two years after he published A Room with a View, it could have been written at almost anytime during his long life. However much he understood the "holiness of direct desire," the emotional purity one achieves by following the heart rather than social orthodoxy, he spent his youth and young adulthood, as Lucy Honeychurch nearly did, repressing his sexual desires to adhere to the expectations of society.Forster was only twenty-nine years old when he published A Room with a View in 1908. He had already published two books,Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907). He was a respected writer, but not yet a famous one, and the themes touched on in his earlier novels—passion and convention, truth and pretense—were now given complexity and eloquence, with the maturity of a more experienced voice, in his third novel.The first seeds for an Italian novel were planted during an extended trip to Florence that Forster and his mother took in 1901. This journey not only unleashed Forster's creativity, but also provided a source of spiritual release from the rigid moral codes of English society. His depression over his own self-deception and his increasing mistrust of English middle-class society are mirrored in the conflicted relationship between the cautious, thoroughly English Honeychurches and the impulsive, free-spirited, socialist Emersons. Forster was tormented, like Lucy, with the possibility of becoming one of "the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words."While Lucy embodied Forster's internal strife, Mr. Emerson was created in the image of a man Forster admired, Edward Carpenter, a social pioneer who believed in equality for women and open expression of homosexual love. First through his published works, and later as a friend, Carpenter was to Forster a beacon of spiritual and sexual liberation who guided him toward a deeper understanding of himself. For Lucy, Mr. Emerson is the "kind old man who enabled her to see the lights dancing in the Arno," who encourages her to follow her heart's and her body's desire, explaining that "love is of the body; not the body, but of the body." This advice she must heed, as Forster makes sure, in breaking from the fettered world of Windy Corner and choosing truth over deceit.The happy resolution of A Room with a View did not come easily to Forster. He started work in earnest on the first draft of his novel in 1902, setting the story entirely in Italy. Forster began the final version in 1904, but put it aside to complete Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey. Forster would not pick up A Room with a View again until 1907, when he commented to a friend, "It's bright and merry and I like the story. Yet I wouldn't and couldn't finish it in the same style." Completing the work would require another full year.The "bright and merry" surface of the novel owes much to the social comedies of Jane Austen and Henry James. Like the heroines of Mansfield Park and Daisy Miller, Lucy begins the novel as a naif on the threshold of adulthood in a strange new world. Forster captures the pretense and manners of her social world with uncanny acuity. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "The social historian will find his books full of illuminating information. . . . Old maids blow into their gloves when they take them off. Mr. Forster is a novelist . . . who sees his people in close contact with their surroundings." Like his forebears, he described the world around him with remarkable precision and insight.Forster readily acknowledged his debt to the 19th-century domestic comedy, but said that he "tried to hitch it on to other things"—to the deeper themes of his work, such as the struggle for individuality and the barriers of social class. Forster's plots and landscapes carry greater metaphorical weight than those of his predecessors: Lucy's anguish in choosing between George and Cecil becomes a contest of modernity against the middle ages, honesty against hypocrisy, clarity against muddle. This subtext provides a richly textured counterpoint to superficial events. The novel's ending is not unambiguously joyful. It almost seems that Forster allowed George and Lucy happiness against his own instincts. "Oh Mercy to myself I cried if Lucy didn't wed," Forster wrote in a letter as he was writing the final version of the novel.Ultimately Lucy was more successful in fulfilling her desires than Forster ever was. As he composed A Room with a View in 1907, Forster was still more than six years away from writing his great celebration of homosexual love, Maurice, and his first fully realized romance lay even further in the future. How did this repressed desire color the development of the novel? The critical literature has shown great interest in the erotic undertones of the men's bath at Sacred Lake and possible veiled references to Mr. Beebe's homosexuality ("somewhat chilly in his attitude toward the other sex"). Some even believe that the entire work is a homosexual romance with Lucy as "a boy en travesti." In the end the object of desire is probably less important than the passionate sentiment. What is remarkable, as critic Claude Summers notes, is that Forster's wrestling with homosexual desire should give rise to one of the richest depictions of heterosexual love in the English language.Certainly A Room with a View can be appreciated from this perspective as a story of sexual awakening that provides insight into Forster's deeply felt struggle with his own sexuality. But it can be read on other levels as well. As a domestic comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen, it brilliantly skewers the world of Edwardian manners and social codes, providing some of Forster's most riotous and revealing portraits in the characters of Cecil Vyse and Charlotte Bartlett. It also can be enjoyed as a book about the contradictions and conflicts of being human: how we reconcile our inner lives with outside expectations, and how it is possible, by opening one's mind, to find faith and love in unexpected places.ABOUT E. M. FORSTEREdward Morgan Forster was born on New Year's Day, 1879, in Dorset Square, London, the second child (the first died soon after birth) of middle-class parents, Edward Llewellyn Forster, a Cambridge graduate and architect, and Alice Clara "Lily" Whichelo. When his son was just one, Forster's father died after a long battle with consumption, leaving the family little money and making Lily a widow at twenty-five. Unwilling to live with relatives and unable to afford a London apartment, Lily moved to a house in the English countryside, Rooksnest, where she devoted herself to her son. At Rooksnest, Forster's life was spent in the nurturing, overprotective "haze of elderly ladies" that included paternal aunts and Lily's friends, and he formed a deep emotional attachment to the place, drawing later on the memories for Howards End.When Forster was fourteen, he and Lily faced the disheartening news that their lease at Rooksnest was up, and they moved to the suburb of Tonbridge Wells. Here, Forster attended the boarding school as a day boy, with classics as his major study. At Tonbridge he wrote for the school newspaper and won several awards for his essays, but nonetheless it was here, a place that contrasted so sharply with his happy home life, where his feelings of being an outsider hardened into an abiding distaste for the English school system.Forster's intellectual and social life blossomed when, in 1897, he entered King's College, Cambridge. With the guidance and encouragement of his classics professor, Forster grew to admire the modern European writers Tolstoy, Proust, and Ibsen, and began to test his own powers as a writer. It was during these years, too, that he first began to acknowledge his homosexuality, falling in love with another undergraduate, H. O. Meredith, who would be the center of his posthumously published novel Maurice. Meredith helped Forster become a member of the "Apostles," the university's foremost discussion group, where he formed friendships with many of the intellectuals later associated with the Bloomsbury Group in London.In 1901, with his formal education over and uncertain about a career, Forster, accompanied by Lily, set off on a year-long trip to Italy to study Italian history, language, art, and literature, and to work on a novel-in-progress. In 1903 he published his first short story, "Albergo Empedocle," and soon thereafter started to write for the Independent Review, a social and political journal founded by his Cambridge friends, to which he would contribute regularly for many years. His first three published novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908) received generally favorable reviews and made him a minor literary celebrity, but not until the publication of Howards End (1910) did Forster achieve major acclaim as a writer.During 1912 and 1913 Forster journeyed to India, beginning a lifelong fascination with the subcontinent. A return journey to India in 1921 provided the inspiration for A Passage to India (1924), which was hailed as a masterpiece on publication. After writing five novels in succession, then ending a fourteen-year hiatus with A Passage to India, Forster retired as a novelist at age forty-five.He spent the second half of his life as a voracious reader, reviewer, and supporter of young writers such as J. R. Ackerly and Eudora Welty. A prominent public intellectual, Forster became the first president of England's National Council on Civil Liberties and was a lifelong spokesman for personal and political tolerance, testifying in the trial that successfully overturned the ban on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.King's College awarded Forster an honorary fellowship in 1946, and he spent the rest of his years in Cambridge. Leading an active literary and social life to the end, Forster died in 1970 at age 91.
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