A Room with a View Love

A Room with a View contains all the standard elements you need for a romance novel – two attractive, emotional young people, flowers, sunshine, violence, and Italy. These elements are so glaringly obvious that one of the book’s characters does indeed write a trashy romance novel about them. In the mundane “real” world of English high society that Forster describes, however, love is a little more challenging and far less obvious. Even if all of the ingredients for a passionate love affair are present, it takes a great deal of courage, determination, and confidence to make them come together.

Questions About Love

1. This story is populated mainly by unmarried or widowed men and women. Do Lucy and George have any models upon which to base their love? Do they need one?
2. Do you see the possibility for other love stories to emerge for other characters in the future? For example, if Room were a sitcom rather than a classic novel, could you imagine a spinoff called “Freddy in Love?” Is romantic love a possibility for any characters other than Lucy and George?
3. In the end of the novel, Love achieves a rather strained and incomplete victory over the forces of Society – how optimistic is this conclusion?

Chew on This

In the world that Forster creates, desires never match up with the socially correct thing to do; he depicts a society fundamentally fractured from its passions.

Love and passion are separate but inexorably linked emotions in this novel. Though many of the characters are capable of love, such as Mrs. Honeychurch and Freddy, not all of them are capable of (or open to) passion.