A Room with a View

This was just a snoozer from start to finish. It was written and set during the Edwardian Era of England (the period of time just prior to the Titanic and Downton Abbey) and it's ostensibly a very progressive book about emerging women's rights and freedoms, but it all just felt so bland to me. An English girl goes on a vacation to Italy with her stuffy older lady cousin. There, they run into some socially awkward men from England and the stuffy older lady cousin is immediately turned off by their ungentlemanly behavior - why, they're even so bold as to offer the ladies their superior hotel room when the ladies are overheard complaining about how their room has no view. (Title alert!) What nerve! Sure enough, the young lady hits it off with the younger of the two free-spirited blokes and by the midpoint of the book she kisses him in an open field. The stuffy chaperone cousin finds them and it's back to England at once! Except, of course, again, the kissing man whore himself is from England, so of course he shows up again in the second half of the book, and of course the young lady is begrudgingly betrothed to a pompous asshole she can't stand, and so of course the wedding is called off at the last minute after she spends some more time with her Italian (not Italian) crush.

But here's where the book gets interesting - not even that interesting, but at least where it briefly had a chance to make a strong statement about women and their growing self-determination in turn-of-the-century Britain. The young lady decides not to marry her Italian (not Italian) crush, either, and opts to spend some time vacationing in Greece with two old spinsters she'd met in Italy. Hey, cool - this girl doesn't need a man at all, and imagine how forward that was in nineteen-oh- wait, what? Oh, look at that. The uncouth gentleman's father has convinced our heroine that she's in love with him and so of course they should get married and who really wants to be without a man all the way in Greece? So our girl settles down into marriage after all, the only difference being that she's chosen a weirdo instead of an asshole.

I was willing to forget how bored I'd been reading the entire book if it had managed to stick that landing with a bold ending. Instead, it wound up feeling pretty anti-feminist and largely irrelevant. Incidentally, I felt very similarly about an American contemporary of this book: Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by "2014 privilege" but A Room With a View just didn't do anything for me.