"A Room with a View"

I just finished listening to a CD version of E. M. Forster’s "A Room with a View" (originally published 1908; Books on Tape, 1993). Forster is one of my all-time favorite authors, so I have read and/or listened to all of his novels several times, especially “A Passage to India,” “Howard’s End,” and “A Room with a View.” As with any great fiction, I notice new aspects, new insights, every time I read this novel. This time I was more struck than ever by Forster’s portrayal of how claustrophobically constricting the social rules lingering on from the Victorian era were, at least for those of the upper middle and upper classes, especially for women. Lucy Honeychurch, the main character, was only allowed to go to Italy under the protection of her fussy, traditional, annoying older cousin Charlotte. There, a huge (in the eyes of Lucy and Charlotte, but especially Charlotte) crisis arose when a man Lucy met there suddenly kissed her on a hill full of violets near Florence. Charlotte and Lucy felt they had to leave Florence abruptly the next day and go to meet friends in Rome; then, and after they returned to England, they kept worrying that someone would find out about the kiss, and Lucy’s reputation would be ruined. The complicating factor was that although she soon after was engaged to another man, she couldn’t quite get the man who kissed her out of her mind. Lucy and other young women of the time had so little control over their own actions, movements, and fates, and although they were very privileged in other ways, the social rules could make them feel smothered and miserable. Of course Forster’s novels are not “about” just one thing; they are all, in some way, portrayals of people’s needs both for human connection and for something transcendent in their lives.