A Room with a View
A young Englishwoman in a Florentine boarding house is offered a room with a view of the Arno, and two men offer her different kinds of life. Forster's lightest novel is also his most argued-about: it is a comedy of manners that keeps turning into an argument about honesty and cowardice.
The Italian sections are deliberately operatic and the English sections deliberately petty, and the contrast is the structure. Forster's narrator keeps interrupting to tell you what to think, which is either charming or maddening depending on the reader. It remains the easiest of his books to love.
Public-domain status
First published in 1908. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; E. M. Forster died in 1970, so the work enters the public domain there in 2041. Check the law where you live before reusing a modern edition, introduction or translation.
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Keep reading
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891
- The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875
- Florence — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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