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Why read A Room with a View?

Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman abroad with her fretful older cousin as chaperone, is disappointed of a promised room overlooking the Arno — and a plain-spoken fellow guest, old Mr. Emerson, offers his own and his son's in exchange. It is a breach of everything Miss Bartlett holds dear, and it is the first crack in the world Lucy has been raised to want. What follows is a comedy of manners with something serious under it: the long argument between what a well-brought-up girl is supposed to feel and what she does feel, played out first under the Italian sun and then back in the tame green of the Surrey hills.

Forster was not yet thirty when he published it, and it is the sunniest of his novels — funny about tourists, about clergymen, about the English abroad and the English at home, and unillusioned about the machinery of class and marriage that his characters mistake for the natural order. It is also, quietly, a novel about honesty: nearly half its second part is a run of chapters titled 'Lying to —,' and the book's whole moral weight lands on the difference between the life you are talked into and the one you would choose if you told the truth.

Its two halves — Italy, then England — make it a natural daily serial: the view over Florence in the first month, Windy Corner and the Sacred Lake in the second, and a heroine deciding, slowly and against a great deal of advice, what she actually saw. Merchant Ivory filmed it in 1985, but the book is quicker and sharper than its reputation for tea-tables suggests.