Teaching A Room with a View

Cecil Vyse reads a tourist novel aloud in a Surrey drawing room and finds his fiancée among the violets. A novelist was on that Fiesole hillside. She put the kiss into print, and Lucy Honeychurch has to sit still while a private Florence becomes parlour entertainment. E.M. Forster published A Room with a View in 1908. The book is already past its midpoint when that reading happens. Italy has already happened. England is teaching her how to forget it.

Lucy Honeychurch is young, well trained, and louder at the piano than she is allowed to be at tea. Charlotte Bartlett, the cousin who chaperones her through Italy, treats a stranger's kindness as a debt that must be refused. George Emerson says little until he kisses her on a terrace of violets, then later tells her that Cecil is for pictures. Old Mr. Emerson offers his rooms across a pension table and, months later, names the love Lucy will not say. Cecil proposes three times, wins on the third, and poses her in a garden as if she were a Leonardo he has acquired for the neighbourhood. A clergyman at the pension hears her play Beethoven and wonders what would happen if she lived as she plays. A novelist turns other people's kisses into chapters, and Lucy's own family wants a match they can mention over tea. The pressure among them is not a single villain. It is a language they all speak, and Lucy is fluent enough to vanish inside it.

The Pension Bertolini gives Lucy a courtyard. The Emersons offer the Arno. Charlotte refuses until the clergyman talks her into taking the gift. Lucy plays Beethoven. In the Piazza Signoria a man is stabbed in front of her. She faints. George carries her to the embankment and throws the bloodstained photographs into the river. On the Fiesole drive she is left among violets. George is waiting. He kisses her. Charlotte sees it, packs them for Rome by morning, and swears Lucy to silence. At Windy Corner she says yes to Cecil. He meets the Emersons in the National Gallery and installs them at Cissie Villa as a joke on the neighbours. Then the novel is read aloud. George kisses her again. That night she breaks the engagement and books passage abroad with family friends. The hinge is the Rectory fire. Old Mr. Emerson will not let her keep the muddle. He says she loves George.