Reading Guide  A Room with a View  A Room with a View
Introduction by: Notes by:   In a journal entry from July, 1910,
E. M. Forster wrote, “However gross my desires, I find that I
shall never satisfy them for the fear of annoying others. I am
glad to come across this much good in me. It serves instead of
purity.” Although Forster wrote this passage some two years
after he published A Room with a View, it could have been
written at almost anytime during his long life. However much he
understood the “holiness of direct desire,” the emotional purity
one achieves by following the heart rather than social
orthodoxy, he spent his youth and young adulthood, as Lucy
Honeychurch nearly did, repressing his sexual desires to adhere
to the expectations of society.  Forster was only twenty-nine
years old when he published A Room with a View in 1908. He had
already published two books,Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
and The Longest Journey (1907). He was a respected writer, but
not yet a famous one, and the themes touc