PBS followed up their wonderfully successful Complete Jane Austen with a new version of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View this past Sunday. Adapted by Andrew Davies, who had a huge amount of success with Pride and Prejudice as well as Sense and Sensibility, he expands the ending and gives this wonderful story a bittersweet turn that is sure to stick with the viewer.

A Room with a View opens in Florence in 1922 with an older, wiser version of the Ms. Lucy Honeychurch we are so familiar with from E. M Forster’s story. With clothes and hair in fashion, she is obviously coming back to Florence to remember a time ten years past, a time she obviously holds close to her heart. While standing in rooms she stood in before, she hears voices from the past. Suddenly the viewer is thrust into what came before.

Lucy Honeychurch, played superbly by Elaine Cassidy, is in Florence as part of her Grand Tour across Europe. Naïve but passionate, even if that passion only comes through in her piano playing, she is being trailed by her prim and proper chaperone, Charlotte (Sophie Thompson). Charlotte, of course, is keeping a close eye on Lucy and reporting back to Lucy's mother, something Lucy doesn’t seem to resent quite enough to be plausible. In the novel, Lucy’s peevishness with her chaperone comes across much more clearly. In this newest adaptation, Lucy just seems resigned to the fact that all of her actions are being watched.  

Despite having every motion picked over and examined, Lucy is ready to be the object of someone’s desire and love, just as she is ready to fall in love herself, though she does not realize it. What better setting than Florence, Italy? Here she meets George Emerson (Rafe Spall), who is on a Grand Tour of his own with his father, Mr. Emerson (Timothy Spall). The Emersons are wonderfully eccentric and Lucy is drawn to them, even though they are working class and supposedly beneath her notice.

The romance that is soon to blossom between Lucy and George is plausible and expected, but I thought Rafe Spall as George Emerson was awkward and unsure of himself. While I don’t remember the particulars of the novel that well, I do remember the character having a bit more spine and it would have been nice to see more of it show through. 

Miss Lavish (Sinead Cusack), an over the top writer staying at the same hotel as Ms. Honeychurch, latches on to Lucy for a day but quickly loses her in a church where Lucy runs into the Emersons. Alone with Mr. Emerson for a moment, he tells her how good she would be for his son, George. Lucy has no idea what he might be talking about and recommends that George take up collecting postage stamps, a pastime which has done no end of good for her younger brother. Mr. Emerson laughs, and though Lucy cannot see what her future will hold, Mr. Emerson can.