Typewriter
INTRODUCTION
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 touched on in his earlier novels—passion and convention, truth and pretense—were now given complexity and eloquence, with the maturity of a more experienced voice, in his third novel.
The first seeds for an Italian novel were planted during an extended trip to Florence that Forster and his mother took in 1901. This journey not only unleashed Forster's creativity, but also provided a source of spiritual release from the rigid moral codes of English society. His depression over his own self-deception and his increasing mistrust of English middle-class society are mirrored in the conflicted relationship between the cautious, thoroughly English Honeychurches and the impulsive, free-spirited, socialist Emersons. Forster was tormented, like Lucy, with the possibility of becoming one of "the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words."
While Lucy embodied Forster's internal strife, Mr. Emerson was created in the image of a man Forster admired, Edward Carpenter,
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 touched on in his earlier novels—passion and convention, truth and pretense—were now given complexity and eloquence, with the maturity of a more experienced voice, in his third novel.
The first seeds for an Italian novel were planted during an extended trip to Florence that Forster and his mother took in 1901. This journey not only unleashed Forster's creativity, but also provided a source of spiritual release from the rigid moral codes of English society. His depression over his own self-deception and his increasing mistrust of English middle-class society are mirrored in the conflicted relationship between the cautious, thoroughly English Honeychurches and the impulsive, free-spirited, socialist Emersons. Forster was tormented, like Lucy, with the possibility of becoming one of "the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words."
While Lucy embodied Forster's internal strife, Mr. Emerson was created in the image of a man Forster admired, Edward Carpenter,