So despite being lower middle class socialists, the Emersons are attracted towards the haute bourgeois lifestyle. Father and son, for example, holiday in Florence and stay at a pension amongst upper middle class English tourists on their return to England George moves his father into a small cottage which is nearby the Honeychurchs’ home and which George visits on weekends. In the world of the novel, the Emersons are therefore disruptive outsiders but they are at the same time also drawn towards the bourgeoisie and seek to live within an upper middle class milieu. A solidly lower middle class clerical occupation. The Emersons lived, it is implied, a fairly humble life and when we first meet George he is working as a ‘clerk in the General Manager’s office at one of the big railways’. He then ‘made an advantageous marriage’ but after turning his back on the Christian faith and refusing to have George baptised they ‘had broken away’ from his wife’s parents and, it is assumed, their wealth. Mr Emerson is referred to as the ‘son of a labourer’ who worked as a ‘mechanic of some sort himself when he was young’ before becoming a journalist for the Socialistic Press. Unlike their fellow guests at the Florentine pension, the Emersons are from the lower classes and are either agnostics or atheists (it is not clear which). And it is a disruption that is built on social class, political belief as well as religious practice.

And this is what I want to briefly focus on in this post.Īmongst the middle class guests at the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, George Emerson and his ageing father are a disruptive element. The plot is, at first glance, a simple love triangle, but on re-reading the novel I was struck by just how much of it is built around disruption and conformity.

However, when George unexpectedly reappears in her life, Lucy must decide between him and Cecil. Despite being attracted to George, once she’s back in her Surrey home Lucy represses her true feelings and instead becomes engaged to the wealthy, respectable Cecil Vyse.

At a Florentine pension patronised by English tourists, Lucy meets the free-spirited George Emerson. Published in 1908, EM Forster’s A Room With a View tells the story of a young upper middle class woman, Lucy Honeychurch, who is touring Italy with her older cousin, Charlotte Bartlett.

Forster's with a view