A Room with a View



One of the achievements I made during the trip back home is to bring back some of my favorite books. I managed to take my Riverside Shakespear, A Room with a View, The Dream of Red Mansion, Out of Laws in the Marsh, Selected Chinese Classic Poems back. I could not wait to read A Room with a View again.

In the opening chapter of his book E. M. Forster, Trilling (1965) stated that "E. M. Forster is...the only...novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something."

I totally agree with Trilling. I started reading Forster from A Room with a View, then to Howards End, then to A Passage to India. I was extremely intrigued by his language, simple but rich, playful yet serious.

A Room with a View remains one of my favorite stories. It is a book that enchants you, in a relaxed manner, with its melodramatic story and witty language. It can provide such amusement, and provoke so many thoughts and reflections.

In 1986, A Room with a View was made into a film, directed by James Ivory, acted by Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett, Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch, Julian Sands as George Emerson, Simon Callow as the Reverend Mr. Beebe, Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse, and Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch. The movie is a triumph of tasteful, intelligent work. It catches the mood, manners, and milieu of 1908 Edwardian England, and the essentials of the story.

The free e-version of A Room with a View is available at http://www.literaturepage.com/read/roomwithaview.html.

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