A Room With a View

Allusions to other works

  • Mr. Beebe recalls his first encounter with Lucy was hearing her play the first of the two movements of Beethoven's final piano sonata, Opus 111, at a talent show in Tunbridge Wells.
  • While visiting the Emersons Mr. Beebe contemplates the numerous books strewn around.
"I fancy they know how to read – a rare accomplishment. What have they got? Byron. Exactly. A Shropshire Lad. Never heard of it. The Way of All Flesh. Never heard of it. Gibbon. Hullo! Dear George reads German. Um – um — Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on. Well, I suppose your generation knows its own business, Honeychurch." [1]
  • At the end of chapter two, old Mr. Emerson quotes A. E. Housman's 'From far, from eve and morning', from A Shropshire Lad.
  • In chapter five, after bemoaning the fact that people do not appreciate landscape paintings any more, Mr. Eager misquotes William Wordsworth's poem title ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’, saying "The world is too much for us."
  • Towards the beginning of Part Two, Cecil quotes a few unidentified stanzas ("Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height", etc.). They are from Tennyson's narrative poem "The Princess".
  • In the Emersons' home, the wardrobe has "Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes" (a quote from Henry David Thoreau's Walden) painted upon it.
  • Cecil announces his engagement to Lucy with the words: "I promessi sposi" ("the betrothed") – a reference either to the 1856 Ponchielli opera of that name or the Manzoni novel on which it is based.
  • When George is lying on the grass in Part Two Lucy asks him about the view and he replies, "My father says the only perfect view is the sky over our heads", prompting Cecil to make a throwaway comment about the works of Dante.
  • Late in the novel Lucy sings a song from Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, finishing with the lines 'Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,-/Easy live and quiet die'. Forster also incorporated Donizetti's operatic adaptation of Scott's novel, Lucia di Lammermoor, into the concert scene of his first published novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Like A Room with a View, The Bride of Lammermoor is centered on a talented but restrained young woman encouraged into an engagement not of her choosing.

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