A Room with a View

Set in early 1900s Italy and England, A Room with a View offers a humorous critique of Edwardian-era society. The novel begins in Florence, Italy, where Miss Lucy Honeychurch, who is chaperoned by her spinster cousin Miss Charlotte Bartlett, arrive at the Pensione Bertolini to find that instead of rooms with a view of the Arno, as promised, theirs face a drab courtyard. Another guest spontaneously offers to swap the rooms that he and his son have to remedy their distress. Thus ensues an unlikely acquaintance and a series of unforeseen, if not fateful, events that upend the lives of the eccentric cast of characters who vividly animate this enduring and delightful tale. Widely recognized as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, A Room with a View is one of Forster’s most celebrated works.

This Warbler Classics edition includes a thought-provoking and historically interesting essay about E. M. Forster’s work by legendary contemporary critic and American public intellectual Lionel Trilling along with a detailed biographical timeline.

E. M. Forster (1879–1970) was an English fiction writer, essayist, biographer, and travel writer whose most popular novels include A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Before his death in 1970 was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature twenty times in fifteen separate years.

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and one of the leading public intellectuals of the twentieth century. His book, E. M. Forster (1943) provides a complex study of Forster’s work for an American audience.