In the Library
A Room with a View
E.M. Forster, 1908
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 20
- Length
- Length 66k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
It is so difficult — at least, I find it difficult — to understand people who speak the truth.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Howards End
E.M. Forster
Forster's own state-of-England sequel does the same thing, but trades one bright Italian spring for two English families who can barely speak to each other across a class divide.
£1.99
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Austen does the same thing a century earlier, watching a clever young woman talk herself out of the very feeling that will make her happy, until she cannot any longer.
£1.99
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton does the same thing on the other side of the Atlantic, trapping her lovers inside a code of politeness so total that breaking it feels like honesty itself.
£1.99
About the book
Miss Bartlett is scandalized that their rooms at the Pensione Bertolini have no view, and two strangers, a father and son named Emerson, solve it by giving up their own. It is a kindness Lucy Honeychurch never quite recovers from. In a field above Fiesole, gone suddenly blue with violets, George Emerson kisses her without asking permission of anyone, least of all Lucy, and something in her that has been trained since childhood to look away simply will not look away this time. Home in England she gets engaged instead to Cecil Vyse, who thinks of her as a Leonardo, a painting to be hung rather than a person to be loved, and Forster watches with real tenderness as she lies to herself about it, fluently, for a hundred pages. What breaks the lie is not an argument but old Mr. Emerson, insisting, almost pleading, that she stop being ashamed of joy. Few novels trust happiness this much, or earn it this hard.