Accompanied by Charlotte, Lucy goes to Florence to find herself, and she learns about Italy's social culture. The story follows Lucy's character arc as she meets the men of Italy alongside Charlotte, whose English societal views start to change.


I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review. ( )

I think, again, this is a book where I probably approached it wrong. Looking at friends' reviews I see stuff about a queer subtext which looking back is very believable! I quickly settled into looking at it as primarily "merely" a portrait of a particular class of people and their social interactions and formalised ideas of life, and I often found it pretty inscrutable. Sometimes it's blunt, but most of the subtlety seemed to be based on social standards and expectations that I can't possibly understand. I felt like I was missing important undertones everywhere. By the end I just felt like the "point" had flown by me. My fault for sure ( )

shortish book full of silly mis understandings and English manners disguised as politeness (especially in their disguise of the English Abroad) that gets Lucy engaged to Cecil, only to be confronted with George. George, the awkward Englishman she met on holiday in Florence, who kissed her in the violets, and who she's in love with really but it takes her ages, and a return to England, to realise she's in love ( )

Easily my least favorite of his major works. The book was, for me, so much of a slog that about halfway through, I put it aside for more than a month. I found the writing just tedious. Finally, I picked it back up and, with the exception of the last chapter or so, pushed myself to finish it. I truly enjoyed, say, Howard’s End and with Passage to India, but the writing here struck me as difficult. I couldn’t always follow the story, frankly, and thinking about it, I believe it is because Forster is being more much more oblique. That is, I think, in part because he is writing about English society and the people he was writing about made it a point to be oblique: candor and clarity were nothing if not avoided. Indeed, several times I went back over chapters I’d read when, later in the book, a character referred to something that I simply didn’t catch or understand at the time. I did think the last chapter or two improved things markedly, but overall, I was very disappointed at the difficulty I had and how little I ultimately I enjoyed it. ( )

An enjoyable book about a young woman who finds true love in a rather unconventional way. This is an interesting look at society in the genteel class during the early 1900s. ( )