A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985.
The first part of the novel is set in Florence, Italy, and describes a young English woman's first visit to Florence, at a time when upper-middle-class English women were starting to lead more independent, adventurous lives. Miss Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her overly fussy and priggish but often ineffective older cousin and chaperone, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. The novel opens with their complaints about the pension where they are staying, the Pension Bertolini, at which rooms with a view of the River Arno had been promised, but which instead overlook a drab courtyard. One of the guests at the pension, Mr. Emerson, interrupts their "peevish wrangling" by spontaneously offering to swap rooms. He and his son George both have rooms with pleasant views of the Arno, and argues, "Women like looking at a view; men don’t." Mr. Emerson's offer causes Miss Bartlett some consternation partly because she looks down on the Emersons because of their unconventional behavior, and partly because she fears that acceptance would place her and her young cousin under an "unseemly obligation." She decidedly rejects the offer. However, another guest at the pension, an Anglican clergyman named Mr. Beebe, assures Miss Bartlett that the Emersons only meant to be kind, and persuades the two women to accept the offer.
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