Books with title A Room with a Zoo: Room with a Zoo, A

This hilarious and touching novel embodies Forster's favorite theme — the "undeveloped heart" of the English middle classes. A Room with a View stars Lucy Honeychurch, a charming naif torn between lingering social and sexual Victorian proprieties and her own emotional needs. Forster’s outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen, and outspoken patriots add wit to what is, in the end, not only a comic masterpiece but a compelling romance and social critique.

A chance encounter… a murder in the Piazza Signoria … an impulsive kiss…and Lucy Honeychurch’s world is forever changed. Torn between settling for a life of acceptable convention or the calling of her true passion, Lucy epitomizes the struggle for individuality and the power and passion of love. A Room with a View is certainly E.M Forster’s most romantic novel, though it also questions the repressed sexuality and closed conventions of the Edwardian society. Set in Italy and England, Forster pivots the easy flowing passion of the Italian culture against the constrictions of late nineteenth century English society and has created a novel of great depth, charm and enchantment that has endured for over a century.

Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant roman-tic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his pas-sionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edward-ian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart? Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk

E.M. Forster was an English writer known for writing on the social issues of British society in the early 20th century. For Forster’s achievements in writing and as a humanitarian he was made a member of the Order of Merit in 1969. A Room with a View is a 1908 novel about a young woman in the repressed culture under King Edward VII’s rule. The novel is a romance as well as a critique of English society at the turn of the century.

An Ariel Recording A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of George Emerson, a fellow Britisher, when she sees a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted as she is to him, he seems entirely unsuitable. And his father may even be a Socialist! Back in England she entertains a more acceptable suitor, but finds it stifling. Will she choose convention, or listen to her heart? "An enduring delight. Forster loved to shock his readers by putting characters in circumstances that called forth their independence and individuality. Written in 1908, A ROOM WITH A VIEW is one of Forster's earliest and most celebrated works." (B-O-T Editorial Review Board)

E. M. Forster's celebrated social comedy explores romantic intrigue and prim propriety among a colorful cast of Edwardian characters. Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman traveling in Italy with her stuffy chaperone aunt, finds herself constrained by the claustrophobic influence of her British guardians and attracted to the free-spirited George Emerson, whose family's radical politics make him entirely unsuitable. Sharing a spontaneous moment of passion with him in the Italian countryside, Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England, she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor and soon realizes she must make a final choice between convention and passion.

A Room with a View was the third of E. M. Forster's novels - those five works which culminated, after the First World War, in A Passage to India. In some ways it is the freshest and most youthful of all. Forster is concerned with 'the undeveloped heart' of the upper middle class in this brilliant piece of social comedy, and the action of the novel opens round a group of English people staying in Florence. The English abroad are observed with a shrewd twinkle, but in the young and unaffected figure of Lucy Honeychurch the author begins to develop his attitude to the changing social values of the beginning of this century. Lucy's relationship with the Emersons, an unconventional father and son, and her subsequent engagement, back in England, to an unresponsive fiance, import a profound meaning into a novel which is always enjoyable and deceptively easy to read. The cover shows "Open Window at St Janet' by Raoul Dufy.