Book 3: Finished.

I finished A Room with a View this morning and I absolutely loved it. The story is light and fluffy and everything you would expect, but the writing is beautiful. There are many, many lines that I marked for sheer wit, or because they made my heart ache (in a good way).

I also loved the characters, especially Mrs. Honeychurch. She was snarky and overbearing and pretentious and so caring that I just loved her. She stole the scene away whenever she popped up. I prattled on about her in an earlier post, but I have one more example of her conversational skills to share:

“’Very well. Take your independence and be gone. Rush up and down and round the world, and come back as thin as a lath with the bad food. Despise the house that your father built and the garden that he planted, and our dear view—and then share a flat with another girl,’” (194).

Simply amazing. It’s just how a mother should speak after hearing their daughter wants to leave.

I also like this passage because it mentions the “view.” The concept of a “view” comes up often within the novel, and in the title. The word view is used in lots of different contexts in the story—from a view from a hotel room, to a view down the street, to how one individual can have a different view than another about someone else—and that word really adds to the depth and power of the story.

The story ended the way it should. The ending fit with the light feeling of the novel as a whole and really just captured everything the author was trying to say about love and how we view love. These next few passages are from the very end of the novel. I chose many of them simply because of how beautifully they are written. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

“’You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expressed it’” (202).

“’I have no time for the tenderness, and the comradeship, and the poetry, and the things that really matter, and for which you marry. I know that, with George, you will find them, and that you love him. Then be his wife. He is already a part of you…It isn’t possible to love and to 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 poets are right: love is eternal,’” (202).

“She ‘never exactly understood,’ she would say in after years, ‘how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once,’” (205).

“’How do you like this view of ours Mr. Emerson?’
‘I never notice much difference in views.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because they’re all alike. Because all that matters in them is distance and air,’” (159).