5 room with a view

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING How does Forster highlight the differences between George and Cecil? Do they represent different worlds, different philosophies, different types of men or just different personalities?

To what extent is Italy (and the English characters´ perceptions of Italy) important to the novel?

Forster once said :¨We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.¨ Does passionate love always transform our lives or can it be domesticated and made to fit our plans?

Biblioteca Camp de l’Arpa

A Room with a View E.M. FORSTER 9 de març 2017 19h Conductora: Pauline Ernest

THE AUTHOR A ROOM WITH A VIEW Edward Morgan Forster was born in England in 1879 and died there in 1970. He attended King´s College at the University of Cambridge. There he was active in a literary and philosophical discussion group, many of whose members were later closely or loosely connected with ´The Bloomsbury Group.´ After coming down from Cambridge, he travelled extensively, first with his mother, with whom he shared a house until her death in 1945, and later with a close friend. He went to Egypt (where he was friendly with the poet Constantine Cavafy) worked for a time in India and wrote novels, essays and criticism.

His novels fall into several categories, reflecting his travel and personal experiences, but all share his belief in the potential of human love to conquer class and cultural barriers and transform the individual. The ´Italian´ novels (Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View) the ´English´ novels (Howard´s End, The Longest Journey and Maurice) and his masterpiece, A passage to India , all brilliantly explore the encounters of people whose culture, class, gender, sexuality and temperament differ. At times, their inability to understand each other is merely comic, at others tragic, but always subtly rendered and with great compassion.

Forster was a conscientious objector during the First World War and declined the offer of a knighthood in 1949, always retaining his intellectual independence. Writing at a time when same-sex relationships between men were illegal, Forster never published his novel Maurice (it was published over 60 years later, after his death).

Yet all Forster´s novels explore the contrast between sanctioned social arrangements (´good marriages´) and love as the passionate encounter with a freely chosen other

A Room with a View is Forster´s most comic, romantic and optimistic novel, with a wonderful cast of eccentric characters, and has remained the most popular of all his novels. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, is a likeable romantic heroine; in spite, or perhaps because, of her faults.

The novel opens in a guesthouse in Florence, where, seeing Lucy´s disappointment at not having a room with a view, George Emerson and his father offer her their room. Aunt Charlotte, Lucy´s chaperone, reluctantly agrees but continues to suspect the radical politics of father and son. A spontaneous kiss between the two young people leads to Lucy being hastily bundled off to Rome and England by her aunt. We later find her engaged to the repressed and pompous Cecil Vyse, who hopes to mould Lucy into the perfect bride. However, Cecil´s snobbish disdain for her family, along with the reappearance of George in their village, compel Lucy to break off her engagement, even though she is not completely aware of her own motives in doing so. The novel ends with Lucy opting for the promise of lifelong love and freedom to grow with the partner of her choice, but at the risk of not being ´forgiven´ by either family or society.

A Room with a View is a wonderful portrait of English village life at the turn of the 20th century, a comic depiction of Edwardian manners and an exploration of self-delusion and self-realization, family and social obligations and romantic love.