A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [107]
—from her Journal (May 1917)
VIRGINIA WOOLF
We look then, as time goes on, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allaying to one of the two great camps to which most novelists belong. Speaking roughly, we may divide them into the preachers and the teachers, headed by Tolstoy and Dickens, on the one hand, and the pure artists, headed by Jane Austen and Turgenev, on the other. Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once.
—from The Death of the Moth (1942)
ZADIE SMITH
E. M. Forster’s A Room with A View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you.
—from The Guardian (November 1, 2003)
Questions
1. “E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot.... Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” So said Katherine Mansfield: Is she right? Does Forster raise expectations he fails to satisfy? Or does what he serves us genuinely satisfy, despite our initial expectations?
2. Given the differences in circumstances, can a young American woman in the twenty-first century empathize with anything in Lucy? Is there something agelessly human in her story?
3. What motivates Forster’s characters to become tourists? Is it their interest in whatever’s foreign? Is it a desire for self-improvement?
4. Everyone agrees that Forster’s prose is very felicitous: graceful, witty, without a sense of strain, easy to read, mannerly. But is it prose that can admit to the gross, the libidinous, the terrible, the down and dirty, or the insane in human life? Could you see Forster addressing any of, say, Dostoevsky’s serious themes?
For Further Reading
Additional Works by E. M. Forster
NOVELS
Where Angels Fear to Tread. 1905.
The Longest Journey. 1907.
Howards End. 1910.
A Passage to India. 1924.
Maurice. 1971.
SHORT STORIES
The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories. 1911.
The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. 1928.
Selected Stories. David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, eds. New York: Penguin, 2001. Comprising a selection of the earlier two volumes.
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Aspects of the Novel. 1927. A treatise on the novel as a genre, from a series of lectures Forster gave at Cambridge in 1927.
Two Cheers for Democracy. 1951. A collection of reviews and essays on politics, aesthetics, art, and writing.
The Hill of Devi. 1953. A memoir of Forster’s tenure as a maharaja’s secretary in India.
“A View Without a Room.” 1958. New York: Albondocani Press, 1973. A “prophetic retrospect” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Room with a View, in which the story is brought up to date.
Biographies
Beauman, Nicola. E. M. Forster: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Criticism
Aspects of E. M. Forster: Essays and Recollections Written for His Ninetieth Birthday, January 1, 1969. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. Contributors include Elizabeth Bowen, Malcolm Bradbury, and Benjamin Britten.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster: A Study. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943.
Wilde, Alan, ed. Critical Essays on E. M. Forster. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.
On Travel and Tourism
Brendon, Piers. Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism. London: Secker and Warburg, 1991.
MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. New York: Signet Classic, 1980.
Other Works Cited in the Introduction
Baedeker, Karl. Italy: Handbook for Travellers: Northern Italy. Twelfth edition. New York: Scribner, 1903.
Bowen, Elizabeth. “A Passage to E. M. Forster.” In Aspects of E. M. Forster. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969.
Forster, E. M. Selected Letters. 2 vols. Edited by Mary