Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
R. A. SCOTT JAMES
There is just enough that is right in Mr. Forster to triumph over the mass of him that seems to us to be wrong. There is no use denying that he begins by irritating us exceedingly. He is full of views; what is worse, he is full of subtlety, a subtlety that rises up and assails you in pregnant epigram or paraded restraint. He insists on assuming—with that blind faith in unrealities which only the ‘intellectual’ is capable of—that Early Victorian rules of propriety are the rules of today, and he flagellates these extinct, or, at least, dying, moral mannerisms with caustic, but belated, satire....
And yet [A Room with a View] is a brilliant novel, a novel which begins by being brilliantly dull and ends by being humanly absorbing. The author gradually gets into his stride, and comes to know his own characters, and make us know them. Dull and trivial as they may seem, they learn to be natural, and the prim, semi-suburban, the conventional is suddenly brought into contrast with the primitive earnestness of flesh and blood and feeling....
Mr. Forster breaks through the bonds of his own art; the very lessons he began laboriously to teach crumble beneath the central human facts which at the last hold his and our attention. The fine, primitive, deep things which do not deny the flesh, even if they are not ‘of it,’ are dear to him, so that he forgets his horrible artificialities, and becomes genuine. The book grows on the reader, and, if he reads with care, he will have cause to be grateful to Mr. Forster.
—from the Daily News (October 20, 1908)
THE OBSERVER
A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster, might also have been called ‘A Young Woman in a Muddle.’ It is a remarkably clever study of the hopeless confusion existing in the mind of an ordinary English girl of the middle class. Lucy Honeychurch is an average specimen of her kind—unoriginal, pretty and ‘nice,’ with second-hand opinions and borrowed enthusiasms. Unconscious of mistake, she blunders into an engagement with an irritating young prig, but, when she does at least learn what she wants, has the courage to break free from the tangle. Possibly this book may not appeal to all tastes, but to some it will prove an undiluted joy. It is full of humour and delightful, commonplace people. Mr. Forster’s gift for sighting the comedy of ordinary social intercourse amounts to genius, the more so as it is entirely unforced and free from exaggeration.
—November 8, 1908
C. F. G. MASTERMAN
Mr. Forster has earned the right to serious criticism. His work—limited to three novels and some shorter stories and sketches—has revealed individuality, distinction, and a power of suggestion which opens large issues. A Room with a View, the title of his latest book, might stand for a title of all his work. He reveals in minute and exact detail the ‘room’ and its contents: the patterned paper on the walls, the sofas and antimacassars, the elaborate, grotesque, or stuffy artifice of conventional construction. And beyond, he shows the ‘view’: outside man’s handiwork, judging, sometimes condemning, always disturbing, the contented occupants of the artificial arena. Dawn flares through the blinds, the sunset casts haunting shadows on the carpets and cushions, outside is the sound of tempest or the challenging silence of the night. And the conflict amongst all his characters—set in the moment where two eternities meet, which is always a moment of supreme choice—arises just from the fact that although their natural and accepted habit approves of the orderly comfort of the ‘room,’ there is within all of them some wild or exultant element which responds to the high calling of the ‘view.’
—from an unsigned review in The Nation (November 28, 1908)
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.
—from her Journal (May 1917)
VIRGINIA WOOLF
We look then, as time goes on, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allaying to one of the two great camps to which most novelists belong. Speaking roughly, we may divide them into the preachers and the teachers, headed by Tolstoy and Dickens, on the one hand, and the pure artists, headed by Jane Austen and Turgenev, on the other. Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once.
—from The Death of the Moth (1942)
ZADIE SMITH
E. M. Forster’s A Room with A View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you.
—from The Guardian (November 1, 2003)
Questions
1. “E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.... Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” So said Katherine Mansfield: Is she right? Does Forster raise expectations he fails to satisfy? Or does what he serves us genuinely satisfy, despite our initial expectations?
2. Given the differences in circumstances, can a young American woman in the twenty-first century empathize with anything in Lucy? Is there something agelessly human in her story?
3. What motivates Forster’s characters to become tourists? Is it their interest in whatever’s foreign? Is it a desire for self-improvement?
4. Everyone agrees that Forster’s prose is very felicitous: graceful, witty, without a sense of strain, easy to read, mannerly. But is it prose that can admit to the gross, the libidinous, the terrible, the down and dirty, or the insane in human life? Could you see Forster addressing any of, say, Dostoevsky’s serious themes?