Lucy, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View [1908], grows up at Windy Corner in the Surrey hills in southeast England, a house impertinent, and inevitable, built by her father. According to Mr. Beebe, a local curate, she has dark hair and an undeveloped face, but she plays the piano wonderfully. “If Miss Honeychurch ever undertakes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her,” he says.
Helena Bonham Carter 1985
Lucy is sent by her mother to Italy, to broaden her outlook, with her cousin Charlotte for a chaperone. In Florence they are disappointed to find their room in the Pensione Bertolini has no view, but the Emersons, a father and son, offer to exchange. Though the English residents of the pensione are nervous about each other’s status, they decide that, at least in Italy, they will do. Except for the Emersons, who are free thinkers and of the rising working class. Mr. Emerson, in particular, says exactly what he thinks.
One day Lucy sets off with another resident to buy reproductions. When she is abandoned, however, an altercation in the Piazza Signorini results in a man’s death. Lucy faints and is lifted into the arms of George Emerson. She is embarrassed, but George makes her sit by the river until she is calmer. She begs him not to tell anyone how silly she has been, but George feels a profound connection with her.
Another day, most of the residents set off into the hills in two carriages. Lucy’s cousin talks to her friend and Lucy, in poor Italian, begs their driver to help her find the curate. Instead the driver shows her to a field of violets at the edge of a promontory. George stands there and he kisses Lucy, but as he does so, they hear Charlotte above calling for Lucy. Lucy and Charlotte swear each other to secrecy and Charlotte reprimands George. In the morning they leave for Rome.
In Rome, Lucy meets Cecil, a rich, well-connected young man. Cecil asks Lucy to marry him. Twice she refuses him, but when they get back to England, to Windy Corner, she accepts. Her mother doesn’t like Cecil and neither does her brother Freddie, but they fall back on the sort of platitudes which allow everyone to participate in an engagement. Even Mr. Beebe, who thinks it a bad idea, participates in the merriment. “They pulled themselves together. Their hypocrisy had every possibility of coming true.”
Cecil cynically offers a vacant villa next to the church to the Emersons to rent. Lucy is inwardly horrified and rehearses the bow she will make to George, “bowing across the rubbish that cumbers the world.” But it doesn’t matter if she is getting married, she thinks. When he hears Lucy is in the neighborhood, George decides it is fate that brings them together.
When Mr. Beebe and Freddie call on the Emersons, Freddie asks whether they would like to go for a bathe, as the “sacred pool” in the woods has enough water in it because of the rain. Even Lucy used to bathe there when younger. George, Freddie and even Mr. Beebe frolic naked in the pool when along come Lucy, her mother and Cecil!
Another day, Freddie asks George to play tennis. Cecil will not make up a fourth for doubles, but rather stalks about reading a bad novel out loud. Lucy realizes it is by one of their Italian friends. In it a boy kisses a girl in a field of violets. Charlotte has told! Everyone behaves badly. Cecil is supercilious, winces whenever Lucy speaks. When he goes back to retrieve the book, George kisses Lucy again!
Charlotte is asked to Windy Corner and Lucy confronts her. Charlotte thinks Lucy must tell her fiancé about George, in case he finds out from some other source. Lucy feels she is in a muddle. She tells George he must not come back to Windy Corner. George remonstrates: “ You don’t mean you are going to marry that man? He daren’t let a woman decide. You listen to his voice and not your own. I love you. I cannot live without you. Love and youth matter, intellectually.” But Lucy does not relent and George leaves.
The scales have fallen from Lucy’s eyes, however. She tells Cecil she cannot marry him. “I won’t be protected. I won’t be stifled. People are more glorious than art and books and music.” Cecil takes it well. “It is true. I am the sort who can’t know anyone intimately. It is a revelation. I won’t forget your insight.”
Lucy decides she must go away. When friends plan to go to Greece she decides to go with them. She says to herself, I must go to Greece because I don’t love George. But everyone else is mystified. Her mother is upset. When the women go in to church in the rain, Lucy stops at the rectory, drawn by the fire. And here she finds old Mr. Emerson, the plain-speaking father of George. He tells her George wasn’t baptized and when he got typhoid at 12, his mother thought it retribution. She died but George didn’t. “We are going back to London,” he says. “George doesn’t want to live.”
When Mr. Beebe comes in he tells Mr. Emerson that Lucy will not go to Greece with Cecil. “My dear, you are in a muddle!” he says. “You love George. You must marry or your life will be wasted!” Lucy cries. “I have misled myself and everyone else,” she says. “We fight for more than love, or pleasure,” says Mr. Emerson. “Truth counts.”
Lucy and George go back to Florence, to the Pensione Bertolini and kiss in the room with the view. Lucy fears she has alienated her family. Freddie calls their marriage an elopement. “If we act the truth, the people we love will return to us, won’t they?” Lucy asks, hopefully.
Anyone might think that for a middle-class, well-off girl to get down to the truth of her real feelings isn’t much of a mountain. But given the mores and values of the stilted social world, I believe it is. E. M. Forster has put his own life-blood into this story: his socialist views, insights gained from all his travels and his love of flesh and blood people. It is a dramatic demonstration of how we come to clarity in the midst of chaotic life.
In an appendix attached to some editions of the book, Forster suggests that Lucy and George are happy and that they have three children. A conscientious objector in the First World War, George fights in the Second. The house where Lucy lives in London is destroyed by bombs. Forster cannot decide where George and Lucy then settle.
