A Room with a View
  • Publication Date: October 6, 2025
  • ISBN: 9781554814473 / 1554814472
  • 318 pages; 5½" x 8½"

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A Room with a View

  • Publication Date: October 6, 2025
  • ISBN: 9781554814473 / 1554814472
  • 318 pages; 5½" x 8½"

This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them—but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his narrative.

Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.

Comments

“Readers being introduced (or re-introduced) to E.M. Forster’s Room with a View are treated by Randi Saloman to a beautiful volume, with a deeply informative and accessible introduction that guides us through Forster’s career; illuminating footnotes throughout the novel; and a feast of delights in the appendices. Literary and biographical-minded readers will learn from Forster’s letters, journals, and essays, whereas the visual-minded can linger on images from a contemporary travel guide; stills from the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel; and photographs of Forster, both as a sensitive young novelist and as an éminence grise of English letters.” — Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Stanislaus

“This edition of A Room with a View is the most sensitive, comprehensive, and suggestive that I can imagine. It provides the student with a clear sense of the text’s history and social context, elucidates complex knots of culture lucidly, and vivifies the central issue of sexual knowledge and consent in Forster’s time and ours. The appended materials are excellent in both selection and scope, providing many new avenues into the text and its adaptations.” — Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

“A wonderful and elegant annotated edition that provides incisive analysis and support to the reader without crowding the core text. Saloman’s judicious use of notes is supremely effective and greatly enhances the experience of reading this classic novel. Broadview’s edition will appeal not only to students, but to curious readers of all stripes.” — Bob Davidson, University of Toronto

Acknowledgements
Introduction
E.M. Forster: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

A Room with a View

Appendix A: Selected Letters and Journal Entries

  • 1. From Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, Vol. 1, 1879–1920
    • a. To Edward Joseph Dent (30 October 1901)
    • b. To Robert Trevelyan (14 November 1904)
    • c. To Edward Joseph Dent (19 October 1908)
  • 2. From The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster
    • a. From Forster’s diary of his trip to Switzerland and Italy (1901)
    • b. From Forster’s “Notebook Journal” (1903–09)
    • c. From Forster’s “Locked Journal” (1909–67)

Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews

  • 1. From R.A. Scott-James, “A Novel of Character,” Daily News (20 October 1908)
  • 2. “A Young Woman in a Muddle,” Observer (8 November 1908)
  • 3. Outlook, vol. xxii, no. 569 (26 December 1908)

Appendix C: Essays and Non-Fiction by Forster

  • 1. “Art for Art’s Sake”
  • 2. “Does Culture Matter?”
  • 3. “The Story,” from Aspects of the Novel

Appendix D: Virginia Woolf, “The Novels of E.M. Forster”

Appendix E: Images from the 1906 Edition of Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy, and Pictures of the Hotel Jennings-Riccioli (the Original of the Pension Bertolini) and Holmbury St. Mary

  • 1. Baedeker’s Northern Italy (1906)
  • 2. Hotel Jennings-Riccioli
  • 3. Holmbury St. Mary

Appendix F: Images of E.M. Forster

  • 1. Forster in Photographs
  • 2. Forster in Drawings and Sketches

Appendix G: E.M. Forster, “A View Without a Room” (1958)

Appendix H: Stills from the Merchant Ivory Film Adaptation of A Room with a View (1985)

Works Cited and Recommended Reading

Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.