From the Bookshelf of EVERYONE Has Read This but Me - The Catch-Up Book Club…

A Room with a View

E.M. Forster

Start date: August 1, 2021

Finish date: August 31, 2021

Discussion: CLASSICS READS

Why we're reading this: Group Classic Read - August 2021
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CLASSICS READS

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What Members Thought

Jan 04, 2023 Beth rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 52-books-challenge-2023

What a perfectly polished gem this little book is! I first read it in what must have been--horrors!--the early 1980s, since it was before the movie came out in 1985, starring a VERY young Helena Bonham-Carter as the ingenue Lucy. I should probably take a look at the movie again, sometime. I was amused to discover that it also stars Maggie Smith as Lucy's stuffy older cousin.

The premise of the story is that Lucy and her cousin Charlotte, as her chaperone, are visiting Florence, where they're sta What a perfectly polished gem this little book is! I first read it in what must have been--horrors!--the early 1980s, since it was before the movie came out in 1985, starring a VERY young Helena Bonham-Carter as the ingenue Lucy. I should probably take a look at the movie again, sometime. I was amused to discover that it also stars Maggie Smith as Lucy's stuffy older cousin.

The premise of the story is that Lucy and her cousin Charlotte, as her chaperone, are visiting Florence, where they're staying at a pension full of other very conventional British tourists. There she meets George Emerson and his father, who are anything but conventional, and her orderly world is turned upside down. Lucy and Charlotte's rooms lack a view; the Emersons have "rooms with a view," but simply to take them up on the offer to trade is somehow shocking, shocking! Charlotte at least insists that Lucy not take George's room, because . . . well, how inappropriate. That's how stuffy and conventional they all are. This is all in chapter 1, so I'm not spoiling anything, I promise.

About half the book takes place in Italy, the other half back in England. It's a beautifully structured book, with each chapter featuring its own little rising action, climax, and denouement. The chapter titles are clever and apt. The novel is moving and also funny in a British comedy of manners sort of way. It's sort of Jane Austen meets the New Woman (the book was first published in 1908).

Once upon a time, everyone--okay, everyone who studied English--read Forster's little book Aspects of the Novel. He had a wonderful observation (at least I think it was him): something to the effect that a well plotted book contains twists that surprise you at first, but then you say, "Oh, that's right" because the surprising thing is absolutely prepared for and completely consistent with the characters, even though you didn't anticipate the twist. That's how the ending of this book was for me.

A brilliant book is well worth rereading, and I'm so glad I revisited this one.
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Oct 09, 2019 Rianto Dermawan rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
… you may understand beautiful things, but you don't know how to use them and you wrap yourself up in the art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it. But you can never pull it out of you ...more

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