What one reviewer at amazon said about A Room With a View:
In modern terms, E.M. Forster's "A Room with a View" is a romantic comedy, and as such, it follows the typical formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl. This basic plot is, of course, embellished with a lot of comical characters, exotic settings, and convenient misunderstandings, but none of this mollifies my opinion that the novel, although well-written, is not very interesting.
Two fussy English women, the nubile Lucy Honeychurch and her older cousin Charlotte Bartlett, are staying in a small hotel (a pension) in Florence, Italy. There they meet the Emersons, a father and son, who do not seem to have much money and are hinted to be "Socialists," which reflects a prejudice on the part of the allegers and doesn't even really mean anything within the novel's scope. Lucy has a brief romance with the son, George, even though she knows he is not quite suitable for her social status. A few other characters also are introduced in Florence, including two clergymen, Mr. Beebe and Mr. Eager, and a romance novelist named Miss Lavish.
The action shifts back to England, where we meet Lucy's doting mother and frivolous, immature brother Freddy, who could be a progenitor for P.G. Wodehouse's aristocratic loafers. Lucy is courted by a snobbish young man named Cecil Vyse whom she has known for a few years and accepts his proposal for marriage. Trouble arises when George Emerson and his father show up as tenants in a nearby cottage, and Lucy must decide whether she is going to submit to social convention and marry Cecil or follow her heart and go with George. Care to take a wild guess about the outcome?
Forster obviously intended this novel to be a comedy, but his humor is stilted and contrived. There are subtle jokes about English class distinction, blatantly symbolic surnames that sound like they came from the board game "Clue," juxtaposed sentences that purposely contradict each other for the sake of painfully overt irony, and satirical snippets that affect Oscar Wilde-style wittiness. The novel's humoristic tour de force is a scene in which Cecil remains oblivious to the fact that Lucy and George had a fling in Italy, even though he reads a direct account of it in a novel penned by Miss Lavish, who fortunately has disguised the names of her hero and heroine. Simply put, the book is as funny as burnt toast.
Colorful but predictable and simplistic, "A Room with a View" may have been an important Edwardian novel, but it seems innocuous compared to the hard realism and bold sexuality of D.H. Lawrence's imminent works. Even the author himself acknowledges the novel's fabrications when he allows Mr. Beebe to state, "It is odd how we of that Pension, who seemed such a fortuitous collection, have been working into one another's lives." Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
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