“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
A Room with a View is a classic fiction, set up in the Edwardian era. This is a beautiful tale of love and liberation. Lucy Honeychurch is transformed by her visit to Italy and the people she met there. Returning to her home in England, she felt at loss finding herself in the repressed morals of the time. But she was ready to settle with Cecil, her fiance who personifies that era until things are unsettled again as acquaintances from the Italy trip moved into her neighborhood.
My experience reading this book
Now I am not a literature student, so I am not going to review and critique this book from the literary point of view. I picked this book as part of a book club I am in. Classics have always been my favorite and this book really caught my attention in just a few chapters.
I feel that if you can associate weather with a book then definitely it is a summer book. It is so warm and sunny. The language really melts into your heart. You will soon fell in love with the simple lives of the old times.
The beauty of the book is that the whole image of a character comes through only at the end when all elements are in place and all conflicts are resolved. There are few characters which I was not very fond of in the beginning, who grew more irritating later too, but comes up as the most pleasant one in the end.
It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.
The book also shed a lot of light on the social conditions, especially the status of women around the time. It was often scoffed upon if women have an opinion and if they follow their heart. And the worse will be if they set to achieve something. A female author has to publish her work under a pseudonym of a male author broke my heart thinking of the condition of women writers of the time.
In the initial chapters, the protagonist of the story, Lucy Honeychurch, gives a promise of good character development. However, I found it going flat as the story progresses. Maybe I was expecting too much from her, maybe that was the maximum character she could have shown given the era. George Emerson, who had a romantic angle with Lucy was my favorite from the beginning. He didn’t use to speak much, but whenever he did he used to add only brownie points to his character. I didn’t like Cecil’s character at all, but that’s how the author intended it to be. I always kept wondering how Lucy has even agreed to get married to him in the first place.
Conclusion
In the end, I really loved this book and I would recommend it to any classic lover. And yes, if you have read the book already do watch it’s movie adaption. It is very well made and quite hilarious.
Be First to Comment