eleanorfranzen 's review for:

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

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Reread, May 2025: I love this book so much. Wonderful Mr. Emerson! Wonderful violets! Even wonderful Charlotte Bartlett, who gets her redemption right at the end. “By the side of the everlasting Why, there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.” I hadn’t realised before how entirely normal Lucy Honeychurch is. She’s not especially clever, or even sensitive. She has one or two talents, including one for Beethoven, and a certain receptiveness. That’s enough; that suffices, because she allows those parts of her to grow, for her to evade the mental and spiritual aridity of her class and time. The fact that she’s not special is precisely what makes her such a good heroine. We could be like this too, Forster suggests; we could all be true to ourselves, and kinder, and happy. Source: old personal copy