A Room With a View (1908)

I did not end up liking this E.M. Forster novel as much as I thought I might. It got the Merchant-Ivory treatment even before Howards End, which is much the better novel. A Room With a View the novel is under heavy influence of Henry James and Jane Austen, with a novel of manners about one Lucy Honeychurch. The narrative is a little smirky. The names are ridiculous, for one thing—Lucy Honeychurch. Miss Lavish, a shallow writer and feminist. Cuthbert Eager, a clergyman. Lucy’s wrong choice for a husband is Cecil Vyse (vice as in the gripping tool, I take it, and not as in the moral weakness). Her best bet is telegraphed quite clearly and then it’s just a matter of getting there. Half is set in Italy, the second half in England. There’s a suitably quirky cast of characters. I thought I might be reading a first novel but it’s more like Forster’s third. A lot of it is clumsy and feels inexperienced. My sense was that Forster wanted to write a Jane Austen novel, but also felt above it and thus wanted to mock it a little. The names, for example. Some of the characters are stock devices to make the plot work, such as an older fuddy-duddy cousin who is annoying. Others are unique and strange, such as the father and son Emersons (which I suspect may be allusion to Ralph Waldo). They are iconoclastic freethinkers. The elder made a fortune or seems to be financially independent. More or less they are Americans, plainspoken and bumptious. There’s a little clan of clergymen too, whose point seems to be to grease the social wheels. I liked the first half quite a bit. The writing seems more open and engaging, loose and fun, with a number of nice scenes as the tourists explore Italy at the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia notes that Forster added an appendix or epilogue in 1958, detailing the fates of these characters. I kind of wish the edition I read had included it, but looking over the summary I’m kind of glad it didn’t. The more I read Forster the more I’m not sure who he is as a writer. Howards End is a much better Jane Austen novel, and the years-later A Passage to India is not at all like either, with much more politically charged themes. Curious now about that Merchant-Ivory version of A Room With a View.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.