A Room with a View

Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman travelling in Italy with her older cousin and chaperon Charlotte Bartlett, reaches a Florence boarding house and is given a room without a view. A blunt old guest, Mr Emerson, offers to trade rooms with her; his silent son George looks at her as if across something. Charlotte refuses, then accepts, and the swap leaves Lucy obscurely unsettled.

Florence works on her. A novelist abandons her inside Santa Croce, she meets the Emersons among the tombs, and the old man tells her his son is unhappy because the things of the universe will not fit together. Days later, alone in the Piazza Signoria at dusk, she watches two Italians quarrel over five lire until one is knifed and dies at her feet. She faints; George carries her; he throws her blood-stained photographs into the Arno and says something tremendous has happened and he means to live. On a carriage outing above Fiesole she falls out of a wood onto a terrace running with violets, and George kisses her. Charlotte sees it, extracts a promise of silence, and hurries her to Rome.

Home in Surrey, Lucy accepts the third proposal of Cecil Vyse, a cultivated young man who treats her as a work of art. Then Cecil, to play a joke on a snobbish neighbour, lets a village villa to two strangers he met in the National Gallery: the Emersons. George is suddenly living half a mile from her door. He swims in the pond in her woods, wins at tennis on her lawn, and kisses her a second time, after Cecil has unwittingly read aloud, from a new novel, the scene among the violets that Charlotte betrayed.

Lucy sends George away, breaks her engagement, and then lies to everyone: her mother, her brother, the rector, herself. She arranges to flee to Greece rather than admit what she wants. On the last evening, sheltering at the rectory, she finds old Mr Emerson beside the fire. He tells her the truth about his dead wife, and then the truth about herself. Lucy stops lying. In the spring, married and half disowned, she and George return to Florence, to the room with the view.