A Room with a View

This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them―but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his narrative.

Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.

Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.