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A Room With a View
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A Room With a View
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A Room With a View
Audiobook7 hours

A Room With a View

Written by E. M. Forster

Narrated by Wanda McCaddon

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Published in 1908, A Room with a View was one of Forster's earliest novels and it has become one of his most famous and popular. The story is set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England and centers on young Lucy Honeychurch's choice between propriety and love. It is an accomplished and beautiful love story, full of generous insights.

Edward Morgan (E.M.) Forster was born in 1879 in London and educated in Cambridge. After graduating he traveled to Greece and Italy. The Story of a Panic was his first short story and was published in 1904. Forster taught in Germany and England. His first novel was Where Angels Fear to Tread, published in 1905. Forster joined the International Red Cross at the outbreak of World War I and was posted in Alexandria until 1919. In 1924, he published A Passage To India. He refused knighthood but was awarded the Order of Merit in 1969. He died in 1970.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 1, 1997
ISBN9781467610865
Author

E. M. Forster

Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970) was born in London and attended the Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge. A substantial inheritance from his aunt gave Forster the freedom to pursue a literary career and travel extensively, and he wrote some of the finest novels of the twentieth century, including A Room with a View, A Passage to India, and Howards End. Queen Elizabeth II awarded him the Order of Merit in 1969.

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Reviews for A Room With a View

Rating: 3.9329977850503486 out of 5 stars
4/5

2,582 ratings122 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Listened to the Classic Tales podcast version. Not bad.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Well, I think I'm going to be teaching this book this year. I see the themes that make it a good one to teach to adolescents. I have a little trouble reading it, though, unless I'm not tired and have no distractions...I tend to get a little lost in the words!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    # 15 Of 100 Classics Challenge
    A Room With A View
    By E. M. Forster

    Some might say Lucy's conservative values have repressed her life and religion. Her outlook is put to the test when Lucy goes to Italy with her cousin Charlotte. They meet outrageous flamboyant characters like Miss Lavish, Cockney Signora, Me Emerson, Mr Beebe and George, a son.....
    Lucy is torn between returning home to her past values or continuing with her new friends unconventional beliefs and energy?
    Really good, really quick read. Recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Our Book Club Classic Read - Listened to this on audio. An absolute delightful coming of the age love story. A touching story with a splash of comedy. Lucy Honeychurch finds herself in a precarious situation. How do you tell the person you are to marry that you are not as innocent as he thinks? How little lies and omissions come back to haunt her and an unlikely encounter upsets her plans.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A lovely romance.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The answer to the question, "Which book should I pack in my carry-on to Italy?"
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I could not find anything interesting about this book at all, particularly after reading the pre-review. I also could not get through the movie, "A Passage to India" although I tried twice. This author does have his fans and may only reflect a difference of tastes in reading material. Readers can judge for themselves.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    English tourists are still arriving in Florence, hoping to be dazzled by the city's Renaissance splendours, and charmed by the laid-back, earthy directness of Italians. But in our current utilitarian age, Forster's themes, unravelling from this classic opening, seem less oppressive. Who checks emotion now, in thrall to the stuffy proprieties of the well-bred? And who bothers with beauty as an ideal, and whether it fits with the lives we lead? Yet this love story still rings true and engages us, because of the credible characters, all somehow at odds with prevailing mores: Lucy, the sulky and passive lead (so memorably cast as Helena Bonham-Carter), George the dashing debunker, and his father Mr Emerson, benign conscience of the novel with his saint-like selflessness, and unmannered romantic simplicity. A satisfying read; almost as good as the film.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The famous story of Lucy Honeychuch was vaguely known to me before reading E.M- Forster's classic A Room With a View, first published in 1909. It ia particularly interesting to read a story from a different time in history that is actually written as a contemporary novel. I dod, however, at times have problems keeping the interest up, because Forster is considerably more implicit than explicit when describing the events taking place and the emotions of his protagonists . Lucy and George are outsiders in a world that is strictly regulated, at least in the minds of the people we meet in the novel, but only George is aware of it. Reading the novel more than 100 years after publication makes it difficult to regard the characters without the spectacles of our own time, and we are in a way peeping in - but this is also what Forster is doing. He is an ominpresent writer, regarding his characters like they are actors in a play, knowing very well what choices they eventually will make. Towards the end, the book really picks up and one starts to really feel for the characters, seeing them actually make choices. The Florence of A Room With a View has become iconic, both through the novel and the film. Before I went there for the first time, Forster's description made up my image of the city. Not many novels have that impact.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is absolutely lovely. I would recommend this to someone who is wanting to read classics, but is unsure where to start, as it is a very easy read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Avoid the 1992 "pre-echo"/"bleed-through" Books on Tape edition (and its later repackaged versions)[4] for "A Room with a View."[1] for the 1992 audiobook by Frederick Davidson. I'm not going to distort the rating for the Edwardian meet-cute romantic-comedy classic "A Room with a View" due to a bad audio experience, so the official vote here is a [4].Otherwise, this is a warning to steer clear of the 1992 Books on Tape audiobook by Frederick Davidson which is badly dated in style but is still being sold as recently as 2017 at Audible Audio. It also betrays its audiotape analog pedigree due to its constant pre-echo / audio bleed-through. This is a quirk from the vinyl/tape era where the audio signal from about 2-3 seconds in the future would "bleed-through" as a artifact in the current signal. The effect is like hearing a phantom distorted conversation constantly in the background of the actual audio that you are listening to. It is enormously annoying and distracting.Frederick Davidson (real name:David Case) was an early legend of the audiobook era and recorded many hundreds of classics. His reading style will seem very old-fashioned now but is still suitable for some characters e.g. Cecil Vyse in the case of "A Room with a View."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very funny observational humour in Florence, a comedy of interior dialogue and exterior manners. Turns a bit gloomy in Windy Corner, with quite a lot of coincidence needed to set up the action, a situation which the author manages to deal with fairly well. A truly inspiring conclusion where things fall into place, with a very profound view of what it means to live a meaningful life.Abridged audiobook (5 hours 14 minutes) read by Juliet Stevenson:A fairly light abridgement (5 and a quarter hours abridged versus approximately 7 hours and 20 minutes unabridged).Excellent narration.Musical interludes tolerable due to the reference to Lucy's playing.Stop the audio when she says "The End" unless you want the Audible.com voice shouting "THIS IS AUDIBLE DOT COM" at you immediately afterwards.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Revisiting old favourites is a wonderful thing. :) I find I discover fresh perspectives or new delights that I don't remember from a first reading. But in the case of this book, that was a very long time ago! So it was as if I was discovering the story all over again. I love this book!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I tried to enjoy this book, but was challenged. The characters were not engaging and the storyline was overly dramatic. Perhaps I'm just tired of English Victorian manners literature? The longest 152 pages I have ever read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lovely good voices a terrific surprise into forester
    I am glad to have readcit
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I tried to enjoy this book, but was challenged. The characters were not engaging and the storyline was overly dramatic. Perhaps I'm just tired of English Victorian manners literature? The longest 152 pages I have ever read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    While being toured around Italy with her fussy older cousin and chaperone, Miss Lucy Honeychurch meets father and son Emerson, both of which make a huge impression on her, one that follows her back to England and changes everything. This is such a beautiful novel - one of my all-time favorites - so I can't say anything other than I love the characters, the setting, the story, the language, and everything else. I saw the Merchant Ivory movie version before reading this for the first time, so those faces are in my mind when I read and they fit so very well. Beautiful, beautiful.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    shortish book full of silly mis understandings and English manners disguised as politeness (especially in their disguise of the English Abroad) that gets Lucy engaged to Cecil, only to be confronted with George. George, the awkward Englishman she met on holiday in Florence, who kissed her in the violets, and who she's in love with really but it takes her ages, and a return to England, to realise she's in love
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've seen the movie, read the book and have now experienced it as a audiobook. Which is best? All of them have their strengths, I don't really have a preference. The story itself is by turns romantic and comedic and at times profound.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    If this is the best of Edwardian literature, then it is a period to avoid. We have cardboard cutout characters with no personality and no development. They have sudden revelations, but most of the time they are trying to sort out who to snub. They argue about coincidences in a plot almost entirely made up of accidental meetings. For a while, I thought the whole thing was a massive, tiresome satire, but I think it isn't that ambitious. It is some sort of tiresome morality play about convention and status, I guess.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If I could give this more than 5 stars I would. Forster writes with beauty, sympathy and understanding. I’ve been wanting to te-read this for a while, and got to it this month for the GoodReads Dead Writers Society Literary Birthday read for January. Sometime last year I re-watched the movie and as I remember it, the movie follows the book very closely, though I’m sure I would see changes if I watched it now after right having finished the book. The only difference I noticed was the ending--in the book Lucy’s family and friends are angry with her for marrying George, but I don’t think that was in the movie. Both have their last scene back in Italy, in the same room Lucy was in before. The BBC apparently has a more recent production that has George die in WWI at the end, and Lucy visit Italy again as an older woman years later without him (!).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Room With A View by E.M. Forster opens in Florence, Italy where tourists Lucy Honeychurch along with her cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett first make the acquaintance of the Emersons, father and son who give up their rooms to the two English ladies so that they will have a view. The other guests at this small inn all are British and are a varied assortment, but right from the start Charlotte is convinced that the Emersons are ill-bred and should be avoided. Of course the Emerson son, George and Lucy are obviously attracted to each other, but Lucy comes to agree with her cousin and tries to stay away from the Emersons but this often cannot be avoided. On a group trip to the Italian countryside, George not only challenges Lucy’s thinking but also kisses her, which in these rigid Edwardian times was a great affront. Lucy, more disturbed than before, and Charlotte pack up and depart Florence.The story then moves forward a few months to England and Lucy accepting the proposal of Cecil Vyse, much to delight of her family. But Cecil is domineering and judgmental. He is constantly telling Lucy what to think and how to act. When the Emersons appear back on the scene, Lucy feels trapped and cannot admit even to herself how she feels about George, but she does find the courage to break off her engagement to the pompous Cecil. Unknown to Lucy someone is making manoeuvres behind her back and ensuring that all works out the way it should.Room With A View is a romance and had many of the trappings of that genre, an exotic setting with summer storms, hillsides of violets, chance encounters and romantic rivals. This is also a love story with repressed feelings, denial, and class barriers, however, the author with his humorous and satirical style gives this story it’s extra sparkle and wit. While I wasn’t totally enamoured with his characters, I did admire the author’s ability to set the scene, serve up some intriguing dialogue, and give the reader a vivid picture of the repressed nature of Edwardian times.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A young man steals a kiss from Lucy Honeychurch on a vacation in Italy - and Lucy begins to question her narrow life, her selfish fiancé, her conventional family, her bleak future.What I appreciate about Room With a View- Forsters empathy with his characters. Even aristocratic and selfish Cecil Wyse we sympathise with when he’s rejected.- It’s sunny, optimistic and witty - very witty. If you want the “darker” E. M. Forster read Howard’s End.- I like the way Lucy Honeychurch is questioning herself, her choices, her opinions, her ideals - the way her irrational mind is trying to make sense of the restricted, narrow world she has grown accustomed to.- That George Emerson remains an enigma throughout the story. His actions we get explained mainly through his father - he’s the fresh wind blowing new life into Lucy’s existence - but a big questionmark to Lucy as well as to the readers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Reread-Started as a 5-star, and absolutely remains a 5-star. I have only one nit to pick, and for me that is pretty amazing. Said nit: Why does Cecil suddenly become human, and not just human but certifiably humble, after Lucy shares her reasons for ending the engagement? Okay, back to work. I do not doubt that I will be thinking about this issue all day despite back-to-back meetings that actually require my focused participation. Full rtfBack for the review --It is easy to forget E.M. Forster was a radical, but he most definitely was. He hung out with Virginia Woolf, he was (obliquely) public about being a homosexual at a time when that was a dangerous choice, he championed gender equality, and he rejected the strictures of upper crust British life in theory if not always in practice. His chafing under societal pressures is so central not just to this book, but to his next, the beautiful Howard's End, and the frustrating and touching Maurice. When I read this in my 20's I don't think I realized how revolutionary some of this was. That may be in part because discussion about the rights of workers and women gets mashed up with overly romantic somewhat nauseating messaging about how love is the answer to all things. Anyway, reading this many years later I was astonished by how ahead of its time much of this was. George says that the future must be one in which men and women are equal. This is really quite shocking. More shocking though is the subtle way in which Forster conveys Mr. Beebe's homosexuality, and hints at Cecil's in the early part of the last century. Most shocking perhaps is Lucy's rejection of money and family to run off and find passion with a socialist aesthete. Could anything have been a more clear rejection of the tenets of 1920's British mores? And Forster makes the reader feel good about all this, casting the horrid Charlotte and the effete Cecil as the exemplars of things proper and English and casting the sweet, shy, depressive George and his loving and defiantly innocent father as the exemplars of modern thinking. How could anyone root for Charlotte and Cecil in that matchup?I know this is primarily a love story, passion over propriety and all that. I love a love story, but honestly reading this as just a love story it doesn't really do it for me. There is, literally, not a single conversation or interaction between George and Lucy that would indicate why he loves her. It is hormones. At least Cecil loved her for her music. George thought her beautiful most definitely and in need of his protection (to save her from ugliness like the blood covered postcards) but they never exchange any other information. Lucy loves him in part for his awkward decency shown in the ceding of his rooms and their view and the postcard incident, and for his honesty and spontaneity in expressing his feelings, and hormones too. There is something there, but George, no. There is not a lot to root for when boiled down to romance. Luckily the book is so much more than that. It is a wonderful and witty slice of life, it is a call for a new day in England, it is an ode to Forster's beloved Italy, and it is a coming of age story (as regards Lucy.) A joy to (re)read. But yeah, I still don't get how the scales fell from Cecil's eyes. I really want to understand that better.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was moderately interesting to read for the historical setting. I also appreciated that Forster was strong in his belief that women could lead independent lives. I did not care for the writing and felt some of it was unclear. I liked many of his literary references.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lucy, a young English woman, travels to Florence Italy, accompanied by an older cousin. The people she meets there at the Pension Bertolini begin to open her eyes to the ways of the world, including romantic inclinations. A study in the repressed morals of Edwardian England. I ended up liking this novel but not nearly as much as I did Howard's End.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent book in many ways. This seems to have been one of his earlier books, and I have seen the views of some critics who mention that the book is not as sophisticated as his later books, like "Howard's End" and "A Passage to India."For my part, I enjoyed the book. We all know that E.M. Forster had an almost lyrical style of writing. He could make images dance before your eyes. This is a love story and a gentle satire on English life at the turn of the 19th century. We lie to ourselves, and then also, to others. We deny our feelings, and often choose, or reject, mates due to social prejudices. In this case, unlike "A Passage to India", there is redemption and a happy ending to the tale. Love rules, prejudiced banished.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Room with a View by E.M. Forster is a 2017 Amazon Classics publication. ( Originally published in 1908)In the continuing saga of 'taming the TBR' this year, I have found it easier to locate classics that I have been meaning to read for years. The brevity of this one convinced me to make time for it immediately instead of letting it continue to gather 'virtual' dust on my Kindle. I had a little trouble with this one- in fact- I almost gave up on it. I was well over halfway into it before I felt engaged in it. By the time I was finished, though, I was glad I stuck with it. This is a light story, with some dramatics, terrific locales, fantastic characterizations, and a moral that is timeless, but overall, I enjoyed it enough, but it didn't make a lasting impression on me. 3 stars4 stars
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Didn't finish. Never read this when I was younger. Obviously beautifully written, but just not holding my interest. Whole chapters about manners and whatnot, just not gonna happen. Same issues as when I periodically try and read Jane Austen. Recognize the brilliance, of course, just to much in another era.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    2 stars

    Lucia (Lucy) Honeychurch is a conventional young woman on tour in Italy in the early 20th century who is accompanied by her middle aged cousin who is a spinster. The trip awakens more in her as she meets some unconventional people and witnesses a murder. She falls in love with George Emerson, an unconventional man who is a socialist and very much an individual. However, she denies and suppreses this as they are separated by Lucia's cousin, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. Lucy becomes engaged to a man she thinks she loves before meeting George once again, and the rest you have to read to find out.

    The book started of rather insipidly, and there wasn't much depth put into the characters. Forster often used surnames as characters labels (surnames such as Eager, Lavish, Vyse (a surname, but sounds just like vise aka vice), or after famous people with certain outlooks that tied into his characters), which I found rather annoying. I finished this for 1001 books, etc, but was not thrilled with this book. Forster clearly meant this book to be a statement, but I didn't find it impressive in the least.