A Room with a View

Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman travelling in Italy with her anxious older cousin Charlotte, is disappointed to find that their rooms at a Florence boarding house look onto a courtyard. Old Mr Emerson and his silent son George offer to swap: they have rooms with a view. From that small kindness grow a murder witnessed in a piazza, a kiss in a field of violets, and back in England an engagement to the wrong man.

E. M. Forster (1879–1970) published the novel in 1908, drawing on his own travels in Italy, and it is his lightest and funniest book, a comedy about the courage to follow one's feelings rather than convention. He later wrote Howards End and A Passage to India. The 1985 film made the story widely loved.