A Room with a View
Complete textLucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her watchful cousin Charlotte, expecting a respectable holiday. Encounters with the unconventional Emersons disturb her assumptions about manners and love, and the questions raised in Italy follow her back to her carefully arranged English life.
Continue readingAbout A Room with a View
Rooms, windows, music, and landscapes become ways of thinking about what Lucy can admit to herself. The comedy turns on polite evasions and apparently minor breaches of etiquette. Forster's warm but pointed narration asks how social approval can disguise fear, and how honesty might require disappointing the people who claim to protect us.
Reading focus
Enjoy social comedy in which travel and music unsettle a young woman's inherited ideas about love and respectability.
This reading edition contains 66,892 words in 20 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: EM Forster. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
“The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!”
Contents
All sections- PART ONE — Chapter I The Bertolini18 min
- PART ONE — Chapter II In Santa Croce with No Baedeker23 min
- PART ONE — Chapter III Music, Violets, and the Letter “S”16 min
- PART ONE — Chapter IV Fourth Chapter10 min
- PART ONE — Chapter V Possibilities of a Pleasant Outing18 min
- PART ONE — Chapter VI The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them.17 min
- PART ONE — Chapter VII They Return17 min
- PART TWO — Chapter VIII Medieval22 min
- PART TWO — Chapter IX Lucy As a Work of Art20 min
- PART TWO — Chapter X Cecil as a Humourist13 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XI In Mrs. Vyse’s Well-Appointed Flat8 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XII Twelfth Chapter14 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XIII How Miss Bartlett’s Boiler Was So Tiresome12 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XIV How Lucy Faced the External Situation Bravely9 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XV The Disaster Within20 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XVI Lying to George13 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XVII Lying to Cecil10 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XVIII Lying to Mr. Beebe, Mrs. Honeychurch, Freddy, and The Servants24 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XIX Lying to Mr. Emerson23 min
- PART TWO — Chapter XX The End of the Middle Ages8 min
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This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 20 sections and 66,892 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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