Before You Begin

A young Englishwoman arrives in Florence with her cousin and a guidebook, having been promised a room with a view — and given, instead, a room that looks into a courtyard. A stranger and his son offer to change rooms with her, and that small act of kindness, faintly improper by the rules Lucy Honeychurch has been raised to obey, sets everything in motion. Between the sunlit squares of Italy and the tidy hills of Surrey, Lucy must decide whether to live by those rules or by what her own heart plainly tells her.

E. M. Forster wrote A Room with a View in 1908, at the close of the long Edwardian afternoon, and it remains his sunniest and most beloved book. Beneath the comedy of chaperones, curates, and well-meant lies runs his lifelong theme: the war between the world as society insists it must be and the world as it truly is. Forster asks his heroine — and us — to see clearly, and then to be honest about what we have seen.

More than a century later the novel endures because its question never dates: how much of a life should be spent pleasing others, and how much simply living? By turns a travel idyll, a drawing-room comedy, and a love story with real stakes, it has been treasured by every generation since.

What follows is an illustrated companion to that world — its people, its places, and its turning points, from the Pension Bertolini to the Sacred Lake. Throw open the window, and see for yourself.