While traveling in Italy with her fretful older cousin and chaperone, young Lucy Honeychurch arrives at a Florence guesthouse only to find her room lacks the view she was promised. The awkwardness is resolved by two unconventional fellow guests, the frank and kindly Mr. Emerson and his quiet, intense son George, who offer to trade rooms. As Italy works its spell, stirring Lucy with beauty, freedom, and an unsettling new awareness of her own heart, she finds her tidy notions of propriety beginning to slip. Forster's luminous 1908 novel sets a sheltered young woman between the life expected of her and the one she might truly want.