A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

Published 1908 · 185 pages · 66,587 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Romance, Satire & Humor

How hard is A Room with a View to read?

A Room with a View scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
Forster writes educated but accessible English. The vocabulary reflects cultured conversation without obscurity. Readers enter easily.
Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
Clear, well-proportioned sentences. Forster values readability. The prose is graceful without being showy.
Abstraction: 48 out of 100
The comedy of manners carries ideas about convention versus passion, but lightly. Forster dramatizes rather than expounds. The themes emerge from behavior.
Information density: 40 out of 100
A short, light novel. Forster doesn't crowd the narrative. Scenes breathe; the pace is comfortable.
Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
Forster's narrator comments with wit and insight, but lets scenes work dramatically. Lucy's growth happens before our eyes, with gentle authorial guidance.
Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
The room with a view, the violets, the Italian sunlight versus English muddle—Forster makes setting embody theme. The symbols are clear, almost schematic.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Forster loves his characters while seeing their absurdities. Charlotte's propriety, Cecil's aestheticism, the Emersons' unconventionality—all treated with affectionate irony.
Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
The comedy ends happily: Lucy chooses George, passion over propriety. Forster provides the expected romantic conclusion with full satisfaction.
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
Two-part structure: Italy and England. The pattern is clear and traditional. Forster's craft shows in proportion, not formal innovation.

How A Room with a View is regarded

A Room with a View holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where A Room with a View sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (131 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, A Room with a View scores 58 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Phaethon at once slipped the left rein over her head, thus enabling himself to drive with his arm round her waist.
Symbol: Formal
It was the old, old battle of the room with the view.
Mythos: Comedy iii (Normal Comedy) (comedy iii)
Lucy bent forward and said with gentleness: "Lascia, prego, lascia. Siamo sposati."
Genre: Novel + Romance

Where the story of A Room with a View takes place

  • Windy Corner and Summer Street, Surrey, 1907 (1907 to 1908), the main setting
  • Pension Bertolini and the hills of Florence, spring 1907 (1907 to 1908)
  • Pension Bertolini, Florence, a year later (1908)

6 things that are true of A Room with a View, with the passage for each

  1. At the Pension Bertolini an old man offers the cousins his own rooms with a view in exchange for their rooms looking into a courtyard.

    What I mean," he continued, "is that you can have our rooms, and we'll have yours. We'll change."

  2. Lucy faints in the Piazza Signoria after seeing a man stabbed, and George Emerson catches her.

    She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.

  3. George Emerson throws Lucy's bloodstained photographs into the Arno.

    "I didn't know what to do with them," he cried, and his voice was that of an anxious boy.

  4. The cab-driver Phaethon is compared to the Greek god, and his passenger Persephone to the goddess.

    he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on the way

  5. Cecil announces the engagement in Italian when Lucy accepts him.

    "I promessi sposi," said he.

  6. Lucy gives Cecil the reason she will not marry him: he cannot know anyone intimately.

    you're the sort who can't know any one intimately.

Scenes in A Room with a View that Frye would name

15 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Cognitio, untitled
That's it; that's what I mean. You love George! Mr. Emerson's declaration triggers Lucy's recognition of what she has been concealing.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Yet as he spoke the darkness was withdrawn, veil after veil, and she saw to the bottom of her soul. Lucy's self-discovery, the central recognition scene.
Displacement, untitled
Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. Myth shows through a realistic cab-driver and his 'sister'.
Analogy of innocence, untitled
this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth. The violet terrace is a paradisal, pastoral image of spring.
Alazon, untitled
The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation. Miss Lavish plays the pretentious guide to the 'true Italy' and then abandons Lucy.
Alazon, untitled
Such romance as I have is that of the Inglese Italianato. Cecil's affected cosmopolitan pose is the impostor-braggart's mask.

Books that share these scenes with A Room with a View

About the author

E.M. Forster