A Room With a View, Pt 3: A lot of lying on the way to Truth, Beauty, and Love

Previously in our deep dive retrospective, Nathaniel visited Lucy Honeychurch at her idyllic pastoral home in England and her new engagement to Cecil Vyse, whose sneering fastidiousness is only matched by his complete inability to relate normally to other people. Things got delightfully complicated when the Emersons turned up unexpectedly as neighbors.  They’re about to get a lot more complicated in part 3, with Charlotte Bartlett, of all people, emerging as the unsung savior of truth, beauty, and love.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW
(a three part miniseries)
part 3 by Lynn Lee

I’ll be honest: although A Room With a View is one of my all-time favorites, for a long time the third act was my least favorite.  Too much lying and denial by Lucy, too much drawing out of the inevitable, not enough humor to make it go faster.  But as I grew older, I came to see it differently.  If the first act is the most romantic and the second the most comedic, the third is – pardon my French – when shit gets real.  We see the emotional consequences of our heroine trying to bury what’s in her heart, and in so doing we get to see her finally grow up. 

1:18:26  First-time viewers may not know it yet, but the library book Lucy’s mother admonishes her to pick up is a narrative grenade...

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