Litsketch 17. Room with a View: When Travel Cures Victorian Repression (Kind Of)

There are novels that arrive like grand trains—majestic, well-scheduled, and heavily metaphorical. And then there’s A Room with a View (1908), which breezes in like a sunbeam through lace curtains, carrying with it the scent of Italian espresso, literary irony, and the faint sound of Victorian propriety being politely unbuttoned.

E.M. Forster didn’t set out to write a radical feminist tract. What he gave us instead is a novel where rebellion is served with tea, liberation comes with sunlight, and the first act of female emancipation begins with a request for a better hotel room.

Yes, it’s that simple. And that subversive.

Lucy Honeychurch: Caught Between a Cello and a Crinoline

Meet Lucy Honeychurch—young, well-mannered, musically inclined, and emotionally corseted tighter than her travel wardrobe. She’s vacationing in Florence with her spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett, a walking reminder that spinsterhood in Edwardian England was not a lifestyle choice, but a slow social suffocation politely hidden in a parasol.

Lucy wants art, passion, experience. What she gets is room number 22, facing a courtyard.

“It is so difficult—at least, I find it difficult—to understand people who speak the truth.”

Enter: George Emerson, the inconvenient truth incarnate.

The Emersons: Philosophy, Scandal, and the First Literary “Woke” Father-Son Duo

George and his father, Mr. Emerson, are not part of Lucy’s world. They’re progressive, outspoken, atheist-adjacent, and positively allergic to British small talk.

Mr. Emerson believes in truth and sunshine. George believes in emotions and balconies. The rest of the guests, all properly uptight and suspicious of anything resembling sincerity, believe in table seating charts and repression.

And when George spontaneously kisses Lucy in a field of violets, society drops its collective monocle.

“She was conscious of his youth and of his solitude, and of the passion that surrounded him.”

And so begins the crisis.

Charlotte Bartlett: Guardian of the Empire’s Morality (and Lucy’s Guilt)

Charlotte, who travels with more judgment than luggage, witnesses the kiss and does what any proper Edwardian chaperone would do—spirits Lucy away, douses the memory in shame, and blames the scenery.

It’s not George’s lips that are dangerous, after all. It’s the view.

“The contest lay not between love and duty. It lay between the real and the pretended.”

Charlotte’s mission: to ensure Lucy chooses pretended.

Back in Surrey: Tea, Tennis, and Terribly Repressed Engagements

Back home, Lucy becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse—a man so dry he could be used to store spices. He loves Lucy’s music, her elegance, her future as an ornament for his drawing room. What he doesn’t love is Lucy herself.

Cecil doesn’t propose to Lucy. He proposes at her.

“He does not love me, I shall never live all my life with him.”

But Cecil represents safety. He represents the respectable path. The un-violet-kissed, un-Florence-shadowed life.

And so Lucy lies. To him, to herself, and worst of all, to George.

George: The Kisser with a Conscience

George is not a Byronic hero. He doesn’t smolder or sulk. He simply exists too truthfully, which in Forster’s world is radical enough.

He returns to Lucy’s orbit by accident (or literary fate), and everything he does—every glance, every word—says, I see you. I remember.

Lucy’s reaction? A textbook case of Victorian denial.

“I am not to look in his eyes, because he is not nice.”

Spoiler: She looks.

The Room—and the View

Forster’s title is no metaphorical fluff. The room is safety. The view is danger. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

To have a room with a view is to see, and to see is to know, and to know is to decide.

Lucy wants the room. Charlotte wants the walls. George wants the view.

Forster wants you to realize that every woman deserves all three.

The Rebellion: Quiet, Inevitable, Romantic (but Not Just That)

Eventually, Lucy breaks the engagement. Not in scandal, but in clarity.

She doesn’t run away. She walks out.

She chooses truth over convention, desire over performance, and Florence over surrey—both literal and metaphorical.

“It is fate. But call it Italy if it pleases you.”

And yes, she ends up with George. But that’s not the reward. The reward is seeing the view and claiming it.

Forster’s Message: Don’t Just Want More—Choose It

E.M. Forster, with his delicate prose and quietly radical heart, never shouts.

He simply shows a girl, a room, and a decision. And in doing so, he gives every reader the courage to unpack their suitcase in the right story.

And somewhere, ABS, The Literary Scholar, folds a map of Florence into a dog-eared paperback, sets down a teacup still steaming with rebellion, and whispers, “Leave the window open. We were never meant to live in hallways.”