A Room with a View
Forster's comedy of social repression is also a love story about what happens when you finally let yourself want what you want. Lucy Honeychurch's journey from dutiful convention to passionate choice is funny and then lovely. George Emerson's love for her remains literature's most direct and disarming.
The most common knock is thinness of plot next to Forster's other novels; readers who read Howard's End or A Passage to India first call this one slighter, even a first draft of the later book. The supporting cast reads as “fairly flat, stock types” to several reviewers, and George Emerson specifically gets called underwritten, given too little space to become a convincing romantic lead next to an Austen or Bronte hero. Multiple readers report a slow first three-quarters of tennis matches and drawing-room marriage talk, and more than one wished for a disruption to the social comedy, one joking “A good murder would really have lightened the mood, I think.” Some say the book is forgettable within days, unable to recall character names shortly after putting it down, and rate it below Forster's longer, denser novels on that basis.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
