Lucy (86) who, with her warped brain, is caught in the tangle (213, 224), can't disentangle her emotions (68, 94), ends conversations in wrangle (215), and gives nervous little bow when she first meets the Emersons (27). Later on, when she sees the nearly naked figure of George, radiant against the woods, Lucy yields the demands of Cecil's propriety: 'Bow, Lucy; better bow.' . . . Miss Honeychurch bowed (152). She introduces winding intricacies into Beethoven, who is usually simple and (51), and in a scene that tells almost we need know her, she shakes hands with Cecil with one hand while twisting up her other hand in the curtains (193). Mr. Beebe (even his name turns back on itself) expresses admiration for the way she has been able herself up speak (203), and thinks of her as a kite in the wind (112). Miss Bartlett with her rings Yesterday had been a muddle - . . . the kind of thing one could not write down easily on paper. . . . [Lucy] thought not so much of what had happened as of she should describe it. . . . But . . . her words fell short of life. (A Room with a View 68, 94, 229) A Room with a View invites the same question that Charlotte Bartlett asks when she sees George Emerson's enormous note of interrogation: What does it mean? (43). The reply might be that Forster's novel is about such matters as love, art, self-realization, Edwardian manners, feminism, values and their revision, exposure and concealment, completion and interruption, daily life and celestial life, the subconscious mind, language, myth - and so on. These and other concerns point an enticing variety of well-tried critical perspectives; however, before restricting our outlook any one of them, we'll do well remember Forster's own expression of pleasure in Matthew Arnold as an author who writes to because he is not writing us (Abinger 91), and his observation that Virginia Woolf's fiction is not as much as it is (Two 252). In what follows, I shall try avoid Lucy Honeychurch's penchant for subordinating experience calculated and therefore valueless stories experience, and I shall try do at least some justice the immediate yet elusive something that A Room with a View is. A promising way of doing this, it seems me, is not scrutinize A Room (or aspects of it) in isolation, but consider it as a whole while at the same time becoming familiar with Forster's characteristic shifts and turns of thought as they are manifested in some of his other work. Without, I hope, losing sight of the foreground in the background, I propose look at Forster's novel in the broader context of his fiction and nonfiction, and respond it as it invites itself be experienced within that context. I note in particular his remark in Aspects of the Novel that all that is pre-arranged is false (99). Forster articulates and dramatizes this idea so often and so variously (we might consider his ironic treatment of Adela's love of planning in A Passage India and his wry humor at Lucy's constant difficulty in remembering how behave in A Room) that it is impossible regard it as anything other than crucial his world view. It has seemed me, therefore, in thinking Forster, that critics of a novelist who prizes the unpremeditated and the involuntary will be well advised adopt flexible and unconventional approaches themselves. Unlike the Lucy Honeychurch of the early chapters of A Room, Forster values direct experience - often profoundly human experience on a grand scale - over limited and edited accounts of it. In fact, it was probably Forster's preference for experience that includes but somehow transcends the personal that prompted Peter Burra remark, nearly sixty years ago, that what stays with after reading Forster is a tone of Anonymous Prophecy that rise[s] up . . . from that anonymous part of a man which 'cannot be labelled with his name. …