A Room with a View

A Room with a View follows Lucy Honeychurch through Florence and back to England, in E.M. Forster's gentle Edwardian romance about love and propriety.

Lucy is touring Florence with her older cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, when a blunt, kind stranger named Mr. Emerson offers to swap rooms so the two women can have a view over the river. His son George is quieter, awkward, and oddly honest, and Lucy can't quite place him. A moment in a crowded piazza, and later a kiss in a field of violets above the city, leave her rattled in ways she doesn't want to examine too closely.

Back home in England, Lucy tries to put Italy behind her. She accepts a proposal from Cecil Vyse, a cultured, correct man who seems to admire her more as an idea than as a person. Then the Emersons take a cottage nearby, and Lucy is forced to face what she actually felt in that field of violets, and what she is willing to give up to keep pretending she didn't.

This is an Edwardian coming-of-age story about class, convention, and the trouble with wanting something you're not supposed to want — a comedy of manners with real feeling underneath the wit. It's perfect for fans of Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, or anyone who likes a slow-building romance set against sunlit Italian hillsides and stiff English drawing rooms.

The telling is gentle and easy to sink into as the story drifts between Florence and the English countryside. Let Lucy's slow, stubborn change of heart be the last thing on your mind.