A Room with a View (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Product Overview

A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classicsseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
Biographies of the authors
Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
Footnotes and endnotes
Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
Comments by other famous authors
Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
Bibliographies for further reading
Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

A charming tale of the battle between bourgeois repression and radical romanticism, E. M. Forsters third novel has long been the most popular of his early works. A young girl, Lucy Honeychurch, and her chaperonproducts of proper Edwardian Englandvisit a tempestuous, passionate Italy. Their room with a view allows them to look into a world far different from their own, a world unconcerned with convention, unfettered by social rituals, and unafraid of emotion. Soon Lucy finds herself bound to an obviously unsuitable man, the melancholic George Emerson, whose improper advances she dare not publicize. Back home, her friend and mentor Charlotte Bartlett and her mother, try to manipulate her into marriage with the more appropriate but smotheringly dull Cecil Vyse, whose surname suggests the imprisoning effect he would have on Lucys spirit.

A colorful gallery of characters, including Georges riotously funny father, Lucys sullen brother, the novelist Eleanor Lavish, and the reverend Mr. Beebe, line up on either side, and A Room with a View unfolds as a delightfully satiric comedy of manners and an immensely satisfying love story.

Radhika Jones is a freelance writer and a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.