‘I was hoping that he was nice; I do so always hope that people will be nice.’
(Lucy Honeychurch, the nice young lady at the heart of A Room with A View, page 29)

‘Well, I am no prude.’
(The prudish Miss Bartlett, Lucy’s chaperone, showing the same ironic lack of self-awareness as all the other characters, p.95)

‘Italians, dear, you know,’ said Miss Alan.
(Old Miss Alan expressing the universal disapproval of the people whose country all these Brits are visiting, p.59)

A Room With A View is very much a novel of two parts: the first, more vivid part, set in Florence, the second, more muted part, set in Surrey.

The first thing all the obvious sources (like the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition and the Penguin introduction, the Wikipedia article and Forster’s own Afterword) tell you is that, although this was the third novel Forster published (in 1908), it was the first one he actually wrote, starting it as early as 1901 after a lengthy sightseeing tour of Italy with his mother.

More importantly, as the Afterword tells us, he wrote the first, Italian part of the novel, all of a piece and then stopped, writing his next two novels (‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ and ‘The Longest Journey’) before returning to write the second, English, part of ‘A Room With A View’.

The gap in writing makes an enormous difference. The Italian half is full of humorous, consequence-free high spirits whereas the second half continues to be moderately humorous but feels slower, more stodgy, and then becomes increasingly programmatic and predictable. It’s very much a novel of two parts and so I’ll review it as two parts.

Apparently, Forster’s working title for the novel was ‘the Lucy book’ and you can see why, as it’s all about young, innocent and virginal Miss Lucy Honeychurch. The cliché is to say the novel describes ‘the awakening’ of Miss Honeychurch, a virginal young woman – just the kind of subject a middle-aged gay man (Forster) would obviously be an expert on.

Part 1. Italy

Cast

Lucy is staying in Florence at the Pension Bertolini with her fussy spinster cousin and chaperone, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. In the pension they meet in quick succession:

Mr Emerson senior, ‘an old man, of heavy build, with a fair, shaven face and large eyes’.

George Emerson, his young handsome son.

The Reverend Beebe, ‘a clergyman whose head was bald and who wore a pair of russet whiskers’. ‘All his life he had loved to study maiden ladies; they were his specialty’ (p.53).

Miss Eleanor Lavish, ‘short, fidgety, and playful as a kitten, though without a kitten’s grace’, a consciously ‘unconventional’ older lady novelist who never lets anyone forget how desperately exciting she is:

‘I have always flown in the face of the conventions all my life.’

Or, as the occupants of the Pension like to say, ‘so original‘ and which, in Forster’s irony, means exactly the opposite. Miss Lavish is at pains to distinguish between herself – unconventional, exciting, creative – and all the other British tourists who she dismisses with breathtaking snobbishness.

‘Look at their figures!’ laughed Miss Lavish. ‘They walk through my Italy like a pair of cows. It’s very naughty of me, but I would like to set an examination paper at Dover, and turn back every tourist who couldn’t pass it.’

And:

‘The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace.’ (p.81)

Making up the numbers in the Pension are two elderly sisters, Miss Teresa and Miss Catharine Alan.

There is a resident Anglican clergyman in Florence, the Reverend Eager. He is short tempered and, like all the British residents of the place, tremendously snobbish about mere ‘tourists’.

The owner of Pension Bertolini, a Cockney lady.

Italians

The unnamed hawker who tries to sell them photos, which the Reverend Eager in his disdain, accidentally rips.

The unnamed driver of the carriage into the hills, characteristically referred to in Greek mythical terms, as Phaethon.

His unnamed girlfriend.

Anti-tourist, anti-Italian snobbery

The snobbery the book depicts and dissects is present right from the start with not only Charlotte and Lucy outraged by Mr Emerson’s intrusion into their conversation, but the disapproving tutting response of everyone else at the dining table.

In the first page you pick up that the Emersons, father and son, are a distinct social notch beneath everyone else and are therefore criticised and sniped at behind their backs by the snobbish ladies. As Miss Bartlett puts it:

‘It is dreadful to be entangled with low-class people.’ (p.92)

The room issue is that Lucy and her chaperone and cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, are upset that they have not been assigned the room with a view they were promised. Overhearing them complain, Emerson father and son gallantly offer to exchange rooms with them. Their rooms have a splendid view which they’re not really appreciating.

There follow various walks around Florence and umpteen conversations in which the characters make snide, subtle criticisms of each other. This is the core of the book, not any particular dramatic event, but Forster’s careful notation of the shifting thoughts and feelings of these blinkered, constrained, painfully conventional, small-minded middle-class snobs.

‘There are some working men whom one would be very willing to see out here in Florence – little as they would make of it.’ (p.74)

Obviously this little gaggle of trippers think that they are different, they are not like the common herd of ‘pension tourists’ (p.71), ‘hot dusty unintelligent tourists’ (p.82) – they have soul, they have feelings, they have insight. When they trot off to all the obvious sights with a guidebook in hand they don’t do it like the vulgar mob, but it in a specially superior way.

‘Stop a minute; let those two people go on, or I shall have to speak to them. I do detest conventional intercourse. Nasty! they are going into the church, too. Oh, the Britisher abroad!’ (p.39)

They’re as dismissive of the Italians as they are of their own countrymen, in fact it’s astonishing just how much these pompous, self-satisfied Philistines dismiss the nation they’ve made such efforts to travel to and study. Specific Italian characters and the Italian nation as a whole are routinely dismissed for all the usual stereotypical reasons.

‘No one has the least idea of privacy in this country.’ (p.54)

‘She said: “Can I have a little ink, please?” But you know what Italians are…

The implication being that Italians are slow and lazy. Here’s the Reverend Beebe’s view (although, admittedly he is being a little satirical at the expense of old Miss Alan):

‘The Italians are a most unpleasant people. They pry everywhere, they see everything, and they know what we want before we know it ourselves. We are at their mercy. They read our thoughts, they foretell our desires. From the cab-driver down to – to Giotto, they turn us inside out, and I resent it. Yet in their heart of hearts they are – how superficial! They have no conception of the intellectual life.’

Here’s Lucy, the sensitive young woman whose spiritual awakening we are meant to warm to:

‘How very odd Italians are!… Mr. Beebe was saying that Italians know everything, but I think they are rather childish.’

And here’s the narrator:

An Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance. (p.73)

This latter sentence is describing a hawker of postcards who is pestering another clergyman they meet, the Reverend Mr. Eager, the English chaplain at Florence, and I couldn’t help cheering every time an Italian pestered, tried to sell postcards to, overcharged and generally ripped off this gang of spoilt silly Brits.

Would we nowadays describe this relentless stereotyping of Italians as racist? What did Italians at the time make of these kinds of the countless fictions describing Brits trekking to Italy for the art and being very disappointed by actual Italians? What do they make of them now?

I call the characters philistine because the book goes out of its way to highlight how none of them have any feel whatsoever for real art or beauty but simply carry the Baedeker guide with them everywhere, into every square and every church, so it can tell them which painting is important and which tomb is beautiful and which view is delightful. Forster is explicit that Lucy only likes art she’s heard of and so knows to be important (p.61).

The one possible exception is the lady author Miss Lavish, who loudly deprecates guides and tells Lucy you can only understand the Italian soul through patient observation. But Forster makes it quite clear how trite and shallow her imagination is when she shares with Lucy her plan for her next novel. In a central incident in the novel two Italian men get into a fight over money and one stabs the other, causing Miss Honeychurch to faint. Next day Miss Lavish explains how she will use this incident as the basis of her next novel only she will change the cause of the argument from sordid money to a jealous fight over a beautiful woman ‘which would raise the tone of the tragedy, and at the same time furnish an excellent plot’, and the plot will concern ‘Love, murder, abduction, revenge’. In other words, she plans to transform something hard, violent and alien into melodramatic tripe, according to a set of hackneyed conventions. In case we can’t work this out for ourselves, Forster later has the (admittedly über-snobbish) clergyman Mr Eager describe Miss Lavish as ‘a shoddy lady writer’ (p.80).

Discussing the same incident (the stabbing) Miss Lavish also delivers sentiments of stunning banality, an opinion which was a thumping cliché even at the time:

‘I confess that in Italy my sympathies are not with my own countrymen. It is the neglected Italians who attract me, and whose lives I am going to paint so far as I can. For I repeat and I insist, and I have always held most strongly, that a tragedy such as yesterday’s is not the less tragic because it happened in humble life.’

And then Forster skewers Lucy’s chaperone, Miss Bartlett, when he has her remark of this superficially ‘unconventional’ but in fact trite, philistine woman:

‘She is my idea of a really clever woman,’ said Miss Bartlett. ‘That last remark struck me as so particularly true.’ (p.70)

Received opinion has it that Forster is gently comic about his characters, but beneath the sly humour I felt there was, at times, quite savage satire by which none of his characters are left unskewered.

Pat 1. Plot summary

Chapter 1. The Bertolini

In Florence Lucy and her chaperone Miss Bartlett room at the Pension Bertolini. They are very disappointed 1) that the Pension is run by a Cockney Englishwoman and 2) that they’ve been given rooms on the inside of the Pension facing the central well, which smells and doesn’t have a view. The Emersons, father and son, kindly offer to swap rooms to give the ladies a view despite the disapproval of all the other guests for their lower class intervention.

Lucy and Miss B are surprised to learn that the Reverend Beebe, who they know from back in England where he has a parish at Tunbridge, is also staying. They get to know the elderly sisters Miss Teresa and Miss Catherine Alan. They also meet the outspoken lady novelist Miss Eleanor Lavish with her unstoppable gush of clichés and condescension:

‘Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation!’

‘One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,’ was the retort, ‘one comes for life!’

‘Buon giorno! Take the word of an old woman, Miss Lucy: you will never repent of a little civility to your inferiors. That is the true democracy.’

Chapter 2. In Santa Croce with No Baedeker

Garrulous Miss Lavish takes Lucy to the church of Santa Croce. On the way they natter about Lucy’s family house back in Surrey (big house, 30 acres). Miss Lavish promises Lucy she doesn’t need a guide book and confiscates her Baedeker, but then darts off to talk to some old Italian, effectively abandoning Lucy, lost in this big barn-like building.

Here she bumps into Mr Emerson who is surprisingly aggressive – he despises religion of all types and insists we should live in the here and now – and candidly explains that his son, George, is unhappy with the universe and could she, Lucy, give him a sympathetic listening and maybe some support. All of which is way beyond Lucy’s comfort zone of middle class chatter (‘the world of rapid talk’) and dumbfounds her.

Chapter 3. Music, Violets, and the Letter “S”

Lucy plays the piano, not to concert standard but well enough, favouring Beethoven. She loves the touch of the keys and always feels emboldened after playing. On a wet afternoon at the Pension she plays the piano. Which reminds the Reverend Beebe of the time he heard her play at a recital and asked to be introduced. He quickly realised that, away from the piano, she is a shallow little creature with nothing to say for herself. Beebe is amused and detached, likes drawing people out and trying to make people happy. He is the nearest thing to a sympathetic character.

Back in the present Lucy, Mr Beebe and old Miss Alan natter and gossip, snobbishly dismissing the Emersons and saying they’ll have to find their own way. Bored and confined, Lucy says she wants to go out for a walk, to the disapproval of Mr Beebe and Miss Alan.

Chapter 4. Fourth Chapter

Forster was gay and his novels are about women. Lucy was recognised in her day, and has been hailed ever since, as a young woman trying to break free of the constraints placed on her sex by Victorian society. But Forster treats the subject in a typically elliptical way. Maybe, to be more accurate, he does so using his lyrical-historical-mythical style. This could be considered a form of euphemism, or a way of raising a subject without really addressing it. No analysis, instead a cloud of allegory.

In chapter 4 Lucy is restless and wants to go out, to experience something big. The biggest thing she can think of is to go for a ride on one of Florence’s electric trams.

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. (p.60)

That is reasonably straightforward, and describes a social view while neatly skewering Miss Bartlett’s worried conventionality. It’s what comes next that is characteristically Forsterian in its lyrical windiness.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war – a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings with other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

A lot of words but not very useful, is it? Then Forster comes back to earth to apply all this back to Lucy:

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt. Here and there a restriction annoyed her particularly, and she would transgress it, and perhaps be sorry that she had done so. This afternoon she was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the electric tram, she went to Alinari’s shop. (p.61)

This wandering off into the world of whimsy, of vague windy allegorical visions, is very characteristic of Forster. He does it more usually when invoking the idea of the pagan beauty of Renaissance art and statuary (which he does here in chapter ), and the pagan power of the countryside, sprinkled with references to the god Pan (which he does in the chapter about the picnic in the country).

But I find it a form of evasion. When he comes to a real, knotty social problem Forster turns into Tennyson and flies away from it.

Anyway, thus blocked by convention Lucy goes shopping and buys postcards of classic paintings. It is funny to learn that she calls any example of nudity ‘a pity’, so that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is great except that the Venus, being ‘a pity’, spoils the picture.

She’s just thinking how bored she is and how she wished something would happen when two men get into an argument, then a fight, then one stabs the other in the chest. She sees blood coming from his mouth then faints. She comes to cradled in George Emerson’s arms, feeling peculiar, gabbling.

But then George behaves just as strangely. They hail a cab to take them to the river and walk a little till George throws something down into the Arno. It was the photographs she’d bought, which were covered in blood. There follows one of those strange scenes in Forster where two ordinary people become the subject of one of his incandescent analyses, limned with purple prose. Forster has invented this incident (the stabbing) is savvy enough to investigate at length the impact it has on his two very different characters. And yet the resulting description is strangely diffuse and disappointing:

She had been in his arms, and he remembered it, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop. It was not exactly that a man had died; something had happened to the living: they had come to a situation where character tells, and where childhood enters upon the branching paths of Youth. (p.66)

There’s something persistently obtuse and unreachable in Forster’s attitude. It’s far stranger than his cosy reputation suggests.

Chapter 5. Possibilities of a Pleasant Outing

Next day Lucy accompanies Miss Bartlett as she sets about her chores. They encounter Miss Lavish in the piazza where the stabbing took place, and hear how she intends to transform it into a conventional melodrama. Among her other clichéd views, Charlotte tells Lucy that Miss Lavish ‘has a high opinion of the destiny of woman’.

They bump into Mr Eager, the resident Anglican vicar in Florence. He suggests they all make up a party to go on a picnic into the hills. He has a grand reputation of the being a true connoisseur with entrance to private villas, advanced knowledge of art etc. In reality he poses and spouts Wordsworth and trite truisms about the benefits of nature. Here in chapter 5 we get a distinct sense of Lucy’s ‘development’. The stabbing and something in George’s rescue of her mean she now no longer sees the reverend with the respect she ought to nor Miss Lavish who she begins to suspect of being a fraud.

They have the nearest thing to a quarrel because the Reverend Eager is haughtily critical of Emerson, who was a parishioner of his back in Brixton (!). He drops dark hints and, for the first time in her life, Lucy is irritated and more or less tells him to spit it out, at which Eager declares that Emerson murdered his life. Well, in the eyes of God. In a manner of speaking, and desperately rows back, leading Lucy to think even less of him.

Charlotte buys a gewgaw in the tourist shop they’re all standing in and restores civility and they part. Lucy suddenly realises she is sick of Florence and wants Charlotte to take her to Rome but the other just laughs at the wild suggestion.

Chapter 6. The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr Emerson, Mr George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them

They hire two carriages to carry the party. The one with Eager and Lucy in, also has Mr Emerson and is driven by a fiery young Italian who, a little into the journey, insists on stopping to pick up his ‘sister’. He immediately places his arm round her waist and spends the ride trying to kiss her. Mr Eager is facing away from the horses and so doesn’t see this but he drives too fast and the ride is exceedingly bouncy and after one particularly egregious bounce Eager turns round to catch the young couple kissing. The result is a huge fuss, Eager insists they get down, the girl must ride on the other carriage, the driver is told he won’t get a tip. Mr Emerson the atheist criticises Eager for denying Life and Lucy sympathises.

Finally they arrive at the viewpoint up in the hills and there’s some fol-de-rol about trying to find the exact position where the obscure painter Alessio Baldovinett set some of his works. They break up into groups. Miss Lavish and Charlotte want to have a good gossip, specifically a good laugh at the expense of George Emerson because the Reverend Eager asked his profession and George replied ‘the railway’ and so they ladies want to have a good snicker at his expense. So they mount a campaign to get rid of Lucy.

She goes back to the carriages and asks the young Italian to direct her to the clergymen. He guides her through woods till she stumbles out onto a terrace packed with beautiful violets. here is standing handsome sensible young George who sees her emerge from the woods like a nymph, so he steps forward and kisses her.

At that moment Miss Bartlett appears over both of them, shouting her name disapprovingly.

Chapter 7. They Return

It takes a while to round up all the scattered members of the outing for, as Forster characteristically puts it:

Pan had been amongst them – not the great god Pan, who has been buried these two thousand years, but the little god Pan, who presides over social contretemps and unsuccessful picnics. (p.90)

The weather turns, it starts to rain, then there is a terrific explosion as lightning his the stands of the tramline a little in front of them. They spend the journey back loudly discussing how lucky they were to escape. But Lucy is full of contrition over The Kiss and Miss Bartlett (her cousin and chaperone) is kind and supportive.

That night, back at the pension, it rains and rains and they have to socialise till finally Charlotte and Lucy are free to go to their room and discuss what to do about The Situation. Specifically, how are they going to stop George talking about The Kiss? They both regard is as an insult. Miss Bartlett wishes there was a real man in their party, such as her brother, who would defend her honour like a lion.

Charlotte announces that they must leave Florence and travel down to Rome by the first train in the morning (not telling Lucy that she had already given notice). These four or five pages very acutely convey the complex and changing relationship between the older, poorer cousin and the younger but developing young Lucy. Both wish things could go back to the simple affection they had before but know it can’t.

Cunningly Charlotte says it is she who will be blamed for The Disaster, unless of course Lucy doesn’t tell her mother… and so Lucy is manipulated into promising not to tell. Sadly, she is alone in her room when she sees the figure of a man outside. It is young George who got separated from the party and has walked all the way down from the hills. As he comes down the corridor Lucy is tempted to stop him and talk to him but she is nipped by Miss Bartlett who opens her door and in a peremptory tone demands an interview with the George in the drawing room. We can assume she extracts an apology and a promise never to speak of The Insult.

Next morning Charlotte and Lucy depart early for Rome (on what Lucy will later call ‘the flight to Rome’) and the Italian part of the narrative is over.

Part 2. England

Cast

All the English characters from part one, plus:

Cecil Vyse, the major figure in the second part of the novel who, right at its start, proposes to Lucy and is accepted.

Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy’s plump generally good-natured mother.

Frederick Honeychurch, Lucy’s rather dim, decent 19-year-old brother.

Floyd, barely mentioned friend of Freddy’s who comes over to play tennis.

Minnie Beebe, 13-year-old niece of the Reverend Beebe.

Chapter 8. Medieval

We are in the living room at Windy Corner, home of Lucy’s family, the Honeychurches. We find Lucy’s brother, 19-year-old Frederick struggling at his anatomy book (presumably studying to become a doctor) and his mother, writing and rewriting a letter to the Vyses. In Rome Cecil Vyse proposed to Lucy and she turned him down. Now Cecil has travelled to Windy Corner to try again and been successful.

Mr Beebe arrives and wants h is tea but finds himself in a conversation with Cecil Vyse that both find uncomfortable. Beebe greets the new politely but can’t help being disappointed. ‘Medieval’ is an adjective used to describe Cecil’s solid sturdy presence.

Chapter 9. Lucy As a Work of Art

A few days later Mrs Honeychurch invites Lucy and Cecil to a little garden party with some elderly ladies. Some coffee is spilt on Lucy’s dress so she and mother disappear leaving Cecil with the old ladies. They are gone some time and return to find him fuming.

They drive in a carriage round to the hillside village of Summer Street where the local landowner, Sir Harry Otway, has been too slow to act to prevent two ghastly modern villas being built. Tut tut, but he’s bought them both. Now he has to find a tenant for one of them, Cissie Villa. Lucy suggests it’s just the size for the two old ladies she met in Florence, Miss Alan and

Cecil is irritated (we are beginning to realise he is always irritated) by Sir Harry who he takes to be a provincial snob, ‘a hopeless vulgarian’, ‘all that is worst in country life’.

Cecil asks Lucy to come for a walk with him in the woods. He is irritated that she only envisions him in a room, never in the woods, in the wild. In the middle of the woods he asks her to kiss him and she acquiesces and he knows it’s all wrong, from the passive way she lifts her veil to the way his gold pince nez gets squashed between them (p.127).

Chapter 10. Cecil as a Humourist

Lucy’s background. Her father was a solicitor local to Dorking who built the modest house, Windy Corner, as an investment but then liked it and moved in. Over the years wealthier immigrants from London arrived and built bigger houses and accepted the Honeychurches as of their class and rank, which they aren’t. Lucy grew up in this tiny self-reinforcing society.

Lucy and Freddy are playing a children’s game with tennis balls when Cecil arrives. Maliciously, he has arranged tenants for Sir Harry’s villa and it is none other than The Emersons, father and son, who he happened to meet in the National Gallery Renaissance rooms. Lucy initially can’t believe it, then is really upset. Temper temper, thinks supercilious Cecil.

Chapter 11. In Mrs. Vyse’s Well-Appointed Flat

Lucy escapes from the immediate embarrassment of the Emersons moving into the villa at Summer Street by going to stay with her prospective mother-in-law, Mrs Vyse, in her London apartments (Beauchamp Mansions SW). Mrs V, like her son, is aware that Lucy is a notch or two below them in terms of class and polish, so she dreamily repeats to her son: ‘Male her one of us’.

Chapter 12. Twelfth Chapter

While the Emersons are still moving in, the Reverend Beebe and Frederick go to visit them. Old Mr Emerson pontificates about the future of equality which will be a Garden of Eden, which will arrive when we stop despising our bodies. He also believes there will be equality between men and women.

Frederick in his empty-headed way asks George if he wants to come to for a bathe in a remote pool in the woods, which he does and the Reverend Beebe joins them for a frolic. This becomes hysterical games of splashing and chase and rugby until, suddenly, Mrs Honeychurch, Lucy and Cecil come upon them, don’t know where to look, Cecil leads them away, but stumble over Frederick hiding in the bracken, then George appearing shirtless, and so on. Mrs Honeychurch is relaxed and just tells the boys to dry themselves thoroughly.

It is a yet another example of Forster’s sense of the spirit in the woods, the pagan gods, his penchant for seeing the sacred in all aspects of live:

It had been a call to the blood and to the relaxed will, a passing benediction whose influence did not pass, a holiness, a spell, a momentary chalice for youth. (p.152)

Or, more explicitly classical:

The sun rose higher on its journey, guided, not by Phaethon, but by Apollo, competent, unswerving, divine.

Chapter 13. How Miss Bartlett’s Boiler Was So Tiresome

1. Lucy had planned for her meeting with George in all manner of social situations but never in her wildest dreams imagined coming across him half-dressed in the woods, as she just has.

2. Mrs Honeychurch, plump and good tempered, for the first time starts to dislike Cecil when he is supercilious on a visit to a local old lady. Back at home Mrs H complains to Lucy that Cecil winces whenever she talks and is also visibly impatient when Frederick sings one of his comic songs. He’s ashamed of them. Class. Snobbery.

3. To try and distract her from criticising Cecil, Lucy mentions she got a letter from Charlotte and, over dinner, Mrs Honeychurch says she’s going to invite her to come and stay while she’s got the plumbers in to fix the boiler in her house at Tunbridge Wells, despite Lucy’s anxious demurrals. She is petrified Charlotte will tell her mother and Cecil about The Kiss.

Chapter 14. How Lucy Faced the External Situation Bravely

I find Forster’s narrative voice very odd, one minute lightly whimsical, the next moment invoking the gods or Fate. And quite often he deploys an intrusive narrator every bit as button-holing as Henry Fielding or Thackeray, thus:

It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude ‘She loves young Emerson’. A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome ‘nerves’ or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed? (p.161)

He meets George at a social visit with the vicar and they are both civil to each other. Then Charlotte arrives for her stay, immediately causing trouble by going to the wrong station and, instead of meeting Mrs Honeychurch who’d gone to meet her, taking a separate cab all the way to the house, and then insisting on paying the fare (five shillings, p.162). Fuss and trivia, thinks Cecil, visible above all this ‘stupefying twaddle’ (p.163).

Out on the lawn Charlotte drops her hapless pose and straightaway asks Lucy whether she has told Cecil about The Kiss with George and Lucy, irritably, says No because it was Charlotte who swore her to secrecy that evening back in Florence, for fear, if the story came out, Mrs Honeychurch would drop her for being a terrible chaperone. So first she wanted Lucy to lie, now, months later, she wants her to tell the truth. Exasperated, Lucy demands which is it to be?

More interesting, really, than the rather stereotypical situation (this entire novel is about One Kiss), is Forster’s characteristically intrusive, and playful, narrator.

Lucy thought this rather a good speech. The reader may have detected an unfortunate slip in it. Whether Miss Bartlett detected the slip one cannot say, for it is impossible to penetrate into the minds of elderly people. (166)

Chapter 15. The Disaster Within

The women (Lucy, Charlotte, Miss Honeychurch and Minnie, daughter of the Reverend Beebe) all go to church on Sunday morning, unlike the infidel men, Cecil and Frederick. Their victoria (horse-drawn carriage) parks near the Villa Cissie so Mrs Honeychurch asks to be introduced to old Emerson, who is courteous, and young George who is frank and humorous. Instantly he and plump Mrs Honeychurch get on.

And Lucy rejoices because it is obvious George has never told his father about The Kiss. In the carriage back Lucy rejoices, partly because she is not a trophy he has bragged about. Back at Windy Corner Forster lays it on thicker and thicker that Cecil doesn’t really care about Lucy. His model is feudal, of himself as a guider and moulder. Lucy will never be his equal. She has increasingly realised that he sneers not only at her family but at her, at her cultural inadequacy. Without realising it she is starting to dread their wedding, planned for the following January.

That afternoon George visits, invited by Frederick to play tennis. After much gabbling about how to make up a four, they play and George is surprisingly competitive. Cecil is not good enough to play and, feeling left out, takes the odd action of walking round the court reading out passages from the silly romance he’s reading. Then, afterwards they all sit on the court and Lucy encourages Cecil, visibly irritated with everything, to carry on reading.

Two things: 1) as Cecil reads the preposterous romantic tosh which is set in Florence, Lucy laughingly realises it’s the book Miss Lavish was threatening to write, which she has now managed to do, and get published under the silly pen name of Joseph Emery Prank. But 2), and much more importantly, somehow she has learned about The Kiss on the hill because she has included it in her romance and Cecil now reads this scene aloud to the assembled group, including the two protagonists of the original kiss, Lucy and George. The effect on both of them is electric and it takes all Lucy’s self-control not to betray it.

But how, the reader wonders, can Miss Lavish possibly have known about The Kiss? And then again, this novel itself, A Room With A View is merely another, higher, sort of romance and so does such a far-fetched coincidence matter?

All this leads to a fateful consequence. As they are making their way back to the house, through a patch of bushes, George kisses Lucy again. Just once then they are in sight of the others and he moves away.

Chapter 16. Lying to George

Lucy has ‘developed’ in the six months since the first kiss (in February). She imperiously summons Charlotte and without much difficulty gets her to admit to telling Miss Lavish (who she became thick as thieves with) about The Kiss. She is mortified that Miss Lavish then included it in her novel (although, it is not exactly a unique occurrence, the manly hero and sensitive heroine of a romantic novel having a kiss) but her bad faith and shiftiness make Lucy ‘despise’ her (p.183).

Next, imperious Lucy calls for George (or more accurately, dismisses Frederick from the room where they’re having post-tennis toast) and tells him to leave. In response George delivers an impassioned declaration of love for her which includes a really devastating critique of Cecil’s character as the type of man who needs to control, who likes playing malicious tricks and will never let her be his equal.

But Lucy doesn’t yield, he gets up and leaves the house, walking up the drive. Charlotte leaps to her feet and congratulates Lucy on her bravery. Lucy steps out into the autumn air at the moment that Freddy calls for her and George to rejoin them for another set of tennis. She says George has left so Freddy calls Cecil to make up the four. But Cecil refuses, pompously saying he is a book man. And at that moment Lucy realises he is intolerable and that evening breaks off the engagement.

Chapter 17. Lying to Cecil

Detailed account of the scene where she breaks it off. When Cecil takes it badly it only makes her angry. They are too different. She will never live up to his expectations. He despises her family. Pitifully, it takes this shock to make him see her for the first time as a woman and not some figure out of a painting by Leonardo, and in a spasm makes him realise he really does love her.

By a cruel irony she was drawing out all that was finest in his disposition. (p.191)

Too late. With great dignity Cecil realises she has become a new woman, with new insights and a new voice. For a moment she is distracted into saying she’s not in love with anyone else, when Cecil hadn’t even broached the possibility, angrily saying it’s disgusting when people always accuse a woman ending an engagement of having someone else when she’s doing it ‘for the sake of freedom’. The power of her speech in favour of women’s freedom reminded me very much of Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House.

There’s one major difference. ‘A Doll’s House’ ends with the door slamming as Nora leaves to start her new life. By complete contrast, Forster’s intrusive narrator delivers his longest speech and it is entirely, devastatingly, negative.

It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that, to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged. Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before. (p.194)

Chapter 18. Lying to Mr Beebe, Mrs Honeychurch, Freddy and The Servants

Next morning Mr Beebe cycles up just as the coach is leaving to take Cecil to the station, accompanied by Freddy. They banter about a letter Beebe has received from the Miss Alans saying they’re thinking about going to Greece this coming winter while Cecil listens politely. When Cecil gets in the coach Freddy quickly fills the vicar in that the engagement is off. As the coach pulls away Beebe thumps the saddle of his bike with happiness and thanks the Lord. He knew Cecil and Lucy were mismatched.

In the house Beebe finds everyone discombobulated, Mrs Honeychurch fussing about the dahlias which have been knocked over by the autumn wind. Beebe goes into the living room to find Lucy playing a Mozart sonata and they slowly talk about the engagement, Lucy spelling out that Cecil was too controlling. But when she hears Beebe’s news that the Miss Alans are thinking of going to Athens, she is desperate to join them.

Their conversation is interrupted because Beebe had promised to take Charlotte and his niece, Minnie, up the hill to the Beehive tearooms. Here Charlotte strongly suggests that there is much behind the breaking of the engagement and when she hears of the Athens plan jumps to support it with an enthusiasm Beebe doesn’t understand (because she understands how much Lucy needs to get away from the vicinity of George).

Back at the house Beebe is instrumental in talking Mrs Honeychurch into letting Lucy travel to Greece. Lucy is thrilled. The Reverend Beebe cycles home in the dark and windy autumn night.

Chapter 19. Lying to Mr Emerson

Lucy is in London with her mother making the arrangements to travel to Greece with the Miss Alans. She refuses to tell them about the engagement being broken off because she promised Cecil she would tell no one till she was out of England. She realises she is becoming detached from her mother. In numerous ways she is growing up. They go shopping for guidebooks and such and quarrel and Mrs Honeychurch makes the biting point that Lucy sounds more and more like Miss Bartlett every day. This cuts Lucy to the quick, but is this Forster’s point? Are we meant to take Lucy’s decision not to reciprocate George’s love as a denial of the life force and so the beginning of her journey into warped spinsterhood?

Anyway, the carriage passes the Cissie Villa whose lights are off and their driver (Powell) tells Lucy the Emersons have moved out. They have collected Miss Bartlett along the way but she wants to go to church so they drive there. While her mother and Charlotte go into the church Lucy goes to the rectory to wait for them and is startled to discover that Mr Emerson Senior is there, notably ill and frail from gout.

He explains that he never knew his son was in love with her, but he did notice how he revived and picked up after the incident of the swimming pond, how he determined to live. He apologises that George was so forward but says he raised him to believe in love and life. For a moment, when he describes George as ‘gone under’ Lucy has a panic that George is dead but what Emerson means is his son has sunk into a depression. He no longer wants to live near Lucy and so has found a place in London where he and his father can live.

The conversation touches on her going away to Greece and the old man assumes she means with her husband-to-be. It’s only when Beebe pops in to collect something and check they’re alright here in the warm (outside it’s a cold and windy, rainy night) and mentions that she’s going away with the Miss Alans that the old man realises Cecil isn’t going, which forces her to admit she’s broken off the engagement and then the old man spots it: she’s in love with his son. She must marry him. Love is eternal and must be fulfilled.

Lucy tries to deny it, is angry, then bursts into tears, then the carriage is at the door and she says she is trusted, she has made promises. At which moment Beebe re-enters saying the carriage to take her home is ready and is thunderstruck when Emerson Senior tells him (Beebe) that Lucy loves George, that they love each other. Beebe becomes really serious for the first time in the book and tells her to marry George, turning and walking out.

She is still not certain and Emerson Senior delivers a page-long soliloquy about love being truth, while she cries. He says if George was here and kissed her it would clarify everything so she begs him to kiss her (in a chaste, fatherly way) and Forster’s prose takes flight into a typically lyrical hymn.

He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive – she spoke at once – his salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, ‘how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.’ (p.225)

‘The holiness of direct desire’, surely that’s the key to the whole thing. I’m always surprised by how much Forster – supposedly poet laureate of maiden aunts – reminds me of D.H. Lawrence, the prophet of unbridled desire. But here, as in all his other books, he praises a pagan, unchristian notion of physical desire and fulfilment.

Chapter 20. The End of the Middle Ages

And so we find George and Lucy who have eloped and are back in the same rooms in the Pension Bertolini, kissing and canoodling and blessing their luck. Lucy tells us that she alienated her family (Frederick and mother) and at a stroke lost the interest of the Reverend Beebe. She optimistically declares that:

‘if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run.’

Maybe. Alternatively, screw them. Live your own life. The narrative ends with a final twist. Charlotte told Lucy that she had no idea old Mr Emerson was in the rectory living room, but George disputes this. He says his father was napping and awoke to see Charlotte in the doorway turning to leave. What… what if her insistence, on that evening, on going to church was a ploy because she knew Lucy wouldn’t attend but would pass the time in the rectory where she’d seen George’s father… What if, at the last minute, she had set it up for Lucy to encounter George’s father, the only person who could talk her round to her impulsive course of action? What if deep within that dried-up spinster’s bosom still lurked romance and love after all?

At which the narrative ends in another one of Forster’s puffs of pagan smoke:

Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean. (p.230)

Forster’s Afterword: A View With A Room (1958)

Forster lived to be 91. In 1958, 50 years after the novel was first published, he wrote an Afterword to it, wittily or limply (depending on your sense of humour) titled ‘A View With A Room’.

This tells us several facts, notably that the first part, set in Italy, was almost the first sustained passage of fiction he ever wrote, which explains why readers from that day to this feel it is wonderfully light and effervescent and entertaining – but that he then put the manuscript to one side to write two novels, the melodramatic ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’, and the long, worthy and (in my opinion) very stodgy ‘The Longest Journey’ – before returning to write the second and concluding half of ‘A Room With A View’ – which explains why, despite a handful of zesty scenes (most obviously the naked bathe in the woods) almost all readers feel there is a distinct falling-off in energy and high spirits.

I’d summarise it by saying the highly enjoyable bitchy satire on English snobbery abroad of the first part is replaced by a boring sense that he felt he ought to be writing something earnest and meaningful (about the growth of a young woman’s character) in the second.

In passing, Forster tells us that ‘The Longest Journey’, his stodgiest and least successful novel, is his favourite – presumably because it’s the most obviously autobiographical and so records events and feelings close to Forster’s own heart.

But the most interesting part of the Afterword, and the thing which apparently spurred him to write it, is the bit where he speculates on what would have become of his characters, in the fifty years since it was published. This is surprisingly detailed and also indicates the vast, almost inconceivable technological and cultural distance which separated 1958 from 1908. What vast catastrophes intervened! Here’s what Forster speculated might have happened to his characters:

George and Lucy marry and settle in Highgate. He gets a better job as a clerk in a government office. Cousin Charlotte leaves them some money and they live well until the outbreak of the Great War. George is a conscientious objector and accepted alternative service. Lucy defiantly continued to play Beethoven (Hun music!) on the piano until she was reported at which point Old Mr Emerson gave the police who called round a piece of his mind. At the end of the war they have two girls and a son and move out to Carshalton.

Hopes of moving to Windy Corner disappeared when Mrs Honeychurch died, Freddy inherited and immediately sold it to raise funds for his own growing family. The garden she tended so lovingly was built over.

When the Second World War broke out the pair were living in a flat in Watford. The children had grown up and moved away to their own lives. George enlisted at the ripe old age of 50. He discovered he liked soldiering, and also that he could be unfaithful to Lucy. The flat was bombed and they lost all their belongings.

George was captured in North Africa and imprisoned in an Italian POW camp (like Eric Newby). When the Italian government collapsed George headed north, arriving in Florence and tried to find the pension where the novel is set, but failed. Things change. The houses had been remodelled, extended, merged and renumbered. The View was still there and the Room, probably, too, but impossible to find. Now (1958) they live in peace, George is in his early 70s and Lucy in her late 60s.

As to the lead character in the second part, poor Cecil Vyse, when the first war came, he found his niche working in Intelligence i.e. the secret service.

Forster makes an interesting remark, in passing, as he describes the couple looking to move after the first war:

The characters in my other novels were experiencing similar troubles. Howard’s End is a hunt for a home. India is a Passage for Indians as well as English. No resting-place. (p.232)

Ten million papers must have been written about gender, ethnicity, empire and so on in all the classics of English literature. I wonder if anyone’s written about the search for a home, for a final resting place.

Feminism

The theme of women’s liberation is so obvious in the book that it’s the lead element in the blurb of the Penguin paperback. Quite clearly Lucy is a young woman who outgrows the social, cultural, religious and economic restrictions which hemmed in women in the late Victorian, early Edwardian era.

Emerson Senior and Junior have scattered comments about the equality of women, which they predict will come but only at some vague future time, in some future utopia. But it’s in Lucy’s bitter dissections of Cecil’s controlling personality that we get the strongest expressions of feminism.

‘When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.’ Her voice swelled. ‘I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place! You despise my mother — I know you do — because she’s conventional and bothers over puddings; but, oh goodness!’ — she rose to her feet — ‘conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me.’ (p.191)

‘Cecil was very kind indeed; only — I had better tell you the whole truth, since you have heard a little — it was that he is so masterful. I found that he wouldn’t let me go my own way. He would improve me in places where I can’t be improved. Cecil won’t let a woman decide for herself — in fact, he daren’t.’ (p.202)

And much more in the same vein. Cecil is a brilliant account of a certain kind of patronisingly controlling man. Part two is less lyrical and freewheeling than the Florence passages but Cecil’s clever, controlling, limited character makes it just as rewarding.

Does Forster’s pagan lyricism undermine his irony?

Forster’s style of timid irony cannot, I think, co-exist with his moments of pure lyricism. The kind of lyrical passages I’m thinking about are more obvious and sustained in the short stories, where every story contains poetic passages about pagan beauty, the spirit of the woods or countryside, the mystery of the seaside grotto in ‘The Story of the Siren’ and so on. In this novel these moments of pure lyricism don’t occur so often but they do occur, and at key moments.

The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers, no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance – unless we believe in a presiding genius of places – the statues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood, nor the glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something, and though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god.

I can see how his subtle demarcation of the changing psychological impact of conversations is part of Forster’s spectrum of sensitivity about moods and feelings and how these can sometimes rise to the level of poetic dithyrambs, passages where the narrator gives vent to a style of lyricism which invokes the pagan gods as if real presences, as in this passage. These moments paint the background to the story, the setting for the English tourists. I can see how, from one angle, it works.

But, for me, these moments also undermine the sense of control present in all the dialogue and much of the descriptive prose. Forster’s irony works precisely because it is so underplayed, very restrained. It concerns very constrained, tightly-wrapped characters revealing themselves through charged conversations. For me, the moments of high lyricism I’m referring to blow wide open the air of restraint and constriction which his dry irony relies on for its affect. Like a stripper arriving at a vicar’s tea party. Like staring at the sun then turning your gaze back to the flowers in a border. After the great efflorescence of the pagan passages it’s difficult to focus back on the subtle details.

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Credit

A Room with a View by E.M Forster was published by Edward and Arnold in 1908. References are to the 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

• A Room with a View online

Related reviews

• E.M. Forster reviews
• Edwardian reviews