A Room With a View

E. M. Forster

It is one of E. M. Forster's most luminous and incisive novels, and one of the great critiques of the late Victorian world. The novel revolves around a central question: can a young woman choose her own life when her entire upbringing has prepared her not to? Lucy Honeychurch represents a whole generation caught between vital impulse and the prison of social conventions. Italy — with its art, its warmth, and its disorder — acts as a catalyst: it shows her what it is possible to feel. England is the place where that awakening must be suppressed or, finally, honored.