A Room with a View

A Room with a View is a romance that makes use of the convention of the marriage plot, but it is also a comedy parodying British tourism in Italy. Forster had spent one year travelling in Italy between 1901 and 1902, and the people and situations he observed during his visit greatly influenced the novel. Lucy’s visit to Northern Italy references the 18th-century Grand Tour, the trip across southern Europe, which was seen as a necessary way for young gentlemen to complete their education. In Forster’s novel, Lucy and her cousin travel to Florence to see the ‘real Italy’ but stay in a pension decorated in English style and managed by a ‘Signora’ with a cockney accent. “It might be London”, claims a disappointed Lucy on arrival.Our story begins in Florence, Italy, where two English women, Lucy Honeychurch and her spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett, are at a hotel full of other English tourists. They are displeased with their rooms, which don’t have a pleasant view from their windows, but a pair of unconventional fellow guests, Mr. Emerson and his son, George, offers to switch rooms with them. This sparks a whole discussion of what is proper and what is improper, a dialogue that continues throughout the book. Eventually, the women take the Emersons’ offer, only after a visiting pastor, Mr. Beebe, convinces Charlotte that it’s okay.The majority of the hotel guests are still unconvinced that the Emersons are socially acceptable, though. Lucy, who realizes early on that Mr. Emerson is actually just an old sweetie-pie who doesn’t play social games well (or refuses to), is saddened by the attitude of the other guests towards the quirky father-son duo. We see that she’s confused and not entirely convinced by the strict rules and regulations of “good” society, and that she’s tempted to follow her own emotions sometimes, rather than just doing as she’s told. She wishes something would happen to her – and it does. She and George both witness a dramatic murder in a Florence squar