Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Set in a Place You'd Like to Visit. This novel starts in Florence, Italy and moves to the Surrey hills in southern England. In the first part we find the sunny, fascinating south, full of life and poetry and violets and poppies; in the second, the typical English countryside with its woods, ponds and weather ever influential on mood and incident. The second setting recalls the novels of Jane Austen, of which Forster was a great admirer.

A Room with a View – E.M. Forster

This 1908 novel combines a rom-com with coming of age story. Delicate, ironic, witty, romantic, comedic, it's well done. The reader can tell that Forster took time and pains to get the sentences right.  Not a sentence too many, no missteps with tone or mood or pace.

Like any earnest young Englishwoman of the early twentieth century, Lucy Honeychurch goes to Florence with the goal of cultural uplift uppermost in mind. Per Edwardian custom, she must travel accompanied by a chaperone (in this case, her poor cousin Charlotte) and must never get separated from her Baedeker, the go-to guide for all serious tourists.

But one afternoon, waiting by herself in a public place, Lucy goes through feeling tired, bored, dusty, and vulnerable. She reaches her own imagination, her own dreams, her mystery that’s only hers: “Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.”

But life doesn’t change just like that, defaults are hard to re-set. Educated according to traditional values ​​of the end of the Victorian era, Lucy uneasily meets the Emersons, father and son, who border on indelicacy by offering to exchange their rooms with the two cousins ​​so that they can benefit from a view of the Arno. In Lucy's unstable world, possibly incurring an obligation is not done. Especially since both the father and the son are rumored to be Socialists, not at all the kind of people to owe an obligation.

This is the starting point of Lucy's inner journey. These two cultures will interact again in England and Lucy will have to examine her feelings and what she expects from life and from her fiasco of a fiancé Cecil Vyse, a symbol of empty preening erudition but also of the late Victorian relationship between men and women, synonymous with psychological confinement. 

I read this novel with my goal of reading more 20^th century writers. But I’m sure Forster isn't a perfect modernist. He occasionally addresses his readership directly with a typically English humor, expresses his opinion in the style of Trollope and asks for the reader's opinion, sometimes urging them not to be too severe with the characters because “Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”

On the other hand, the lightness of the novel and its cheerful tone do not prevent Forster from expressing modern messages. He urges the readers to re-evaluate emotion, sexuality and the human body in general, in the frank reflection of Pa Emerson:

I only wish poets would say this, too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul! Your soul, dear Lucy!

Foster also speaks of equality between the sexes as a goal. Only through the joint struggle of men and women can it be achieved. He also insists on the importance of weighing logic and emotion to reach truth, understood not only as a value in itself but above all as honesty towards oneself and fidelity to what one is. We have a duty to know ourselves, identify our own values, lest we never find out and failing in ignorance, also failing to resolve muddle (a word mentioned 20 times in this novel) in its usual forms, and failing to find intimacy with somebody else.

Truly an enchanting, funny and intelligent novel. Not as ambitious and engrossing as the major novel in his early period, Howards End, but a very enjoyable read.