Quite enjoyed Forster's study of class and romance. Loved the scenes in Italy. How is it they fall in love so fast?

I saw this film when I was a teenager (over 20 years ago) and it must have stayed with me because I heard Maggie Smith and Helena Bonham Carter saying all their lines as I read. They are such wonderful characters. Oh and Mr Beebe too. I love the way Lucy talks. I'm not sure George is the right guy for Lucy, but Cecil? Urgh, he's such a cad. I find it hard to believe he managed to talk her into saying yes in the first place.

I found the 100+yo text a bit harder to read than modern lit, so I was glad it was a pretty short book. I really enjoyed it tho!

This is wonderfully read by Juliet Stevenson but it is marred by the fact that it is abridged. I so wish it were the entire text.

Warning: there will be gushing in this review, and lots of it.

“Where have you been all my life?” is the question that keeps running through my head the more I read by and about Forster. I loved “Arctic Summer”, and Wendy Moffat’s biography about him is fascinating so far. I also really enjoyed “Maurice” when I read it in January, but I absolutely will have to re-read it now that I know more about Forster.

I picked “A Room with a View” because I wanted to read one of his earlier novels first. The thing is, I knew “about” it, in the sense that it existed and that it was a classic of modern English literature. And while I had now idea what it was about, I was surprised that it was about this English girl traveling to Italy who ends up in some kind of love triangle. And that it was as funny as it was. I laughed out loud several times, which is rare. But he somehow manages not to be mean while still being sharp. Add to that his observations about men and women that were startingly modern (sadly, more modern than what we find in some books today) and about life itself, some of which I found really profound. I loved every sentence in this book.

But even more than all that - there is something in his writing that strikes a chord in me, that just resonates. When I read in Wendy Moffat’s biography that his “aesthetic enterprise in a single subject [was]: the search of each person for an honest connection with a human being.”, I thought, right, that’s why I love his writing so much. So yeah. E.M. Forster is my discovery of the year.

Edit: I re-read this in preparation for my book club and if anything I like it even better now. It's a book that absolutely stands up to close scrutiny and re-reading and it is SO funny. I mean, sure, sense of humour is something extremely subjective, but Forster's is brilliant imho. So there.

I loved it. The way Lucy Honeychurch grows as a character and matures into an admirable young woman is splendidly written and I just really like it. It makes me feel good. The movie is gorgeous, too, and has a fantastic cast (except Julian Sand, who seems to be auditioning for the part instead of actually playing it).

i evidently read this book years ago but had no memory of it so i picked it up again after a quick stop in italy earlier last year. (i then put it down for several months..)
upon reflection, it's a book of dichotomies, appropriately told in two parts - italy and england, passion and reason (embodied in the contrast between michelangelo and leonardo), embracing new ideas and being stuck in an arbitrary past. i do wish lucy had been slightly more developed as a character and that the initial connection between her and george had been a little more substantive. but i guess with forster's work there are often small gestures or events that stand in for larger ideas. if i could i'd give it an extra 0.5, if only for some lovely lines describing the english and italian countryside.
[also, if you haven't watched the merchant ivory film version it's a very faithful adaptation with a phenomenal cast.]

I had seen the Merchant Ivory film & only read this because it was the only reasonable looking fiction on a very limited book-exchange shelf. Lucky me!

This original story has a different plot from the film, giving Lucy Honeybourne far more intelligence as she grows up being exposed to people outside her restricted world. The characters so well drawn, with all their foibles. I understand, now, the desire of the well-educated middle-aged, middle class to instruct the young in this sort of "great literature" - but it would have been futile to impose it on me in my youth!! I simply would not have understood.