A Room with a View
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50 free A Room with a View trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
E. M. Forster's novel begins with a squabble over hotel rooms and turns into one of the best-loved romances in English fiction: a young Englishwoman abroad, a kiss she is told to forget, and a choice between the life expected of her and the one she wants. The 1985 film made stars of its young leads and is still the version many people picture first. This quiz covers both. Expect questions on the plot in Italy and in England, the Honeychurches, the Emersons and the insufferable Cecil, along with the cast, the music and the awards of the film, the author's life, and the adaptations and homages that followed. It suits book clubs, students revising the novel and anyone who has just watched the film again. The questions run from easy openers to details only close readers will catch, each with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In A Room with a View, which river were Lucy and Charlotte promised they would see from their Florence rooms?
The Arno
The Arno was the view they had been promised, but their rooms faced a courtyard instead. Mr Emerson's blunt offer to swap rooms sets the whole story going.
Q 02Which actress, aged eighteen, had her film breakthrough as Lucy Honeychurch in the 1985 film A Room with a View?
Helena Bonham Carter
Helena Bonham Carter had just finished Lady Jane when she was cast, and matched Forster's picture of Lucy as a pale young lady with a mass of dark hair.
Q 03In A Room with a View, what does Lucy witness in the Piazza della Signoria that makes her faint into George's arms?
A fatal stabbing
A fatal stabbing takes place right in front of Lucy as two men quarrel over a debt, and George carries her clear. Shaken, the pair end up talking alone for the first time.
Q 04Which actress, later Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess, played Charlotte Bartlett in the 1985 film A Room with a View?
Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe as Lucy's fretful cousin, and was Oscar-nominated too. Twenty-five years later she was trading barbs at Downton.
Q 05Which star of My Left Foot and Lincoln played the snobbish Cecil Vyse in the 1985 film A Room with a View?
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis was offered either George or Cecil and chose the prig as the harder part, in the same year he broke through in My Beautiful Laundrette.
Q 06In which US sitcom does the Finer Things Club discuss A Room with a View over an English tea party?
The Office
The Office gave the book to Pam, Oscar and Toby's exclusive club in the 2007 episode Branch Wars, while Andy's desperate efforts to join got nowhere.
Q 07In A Room with a View, Freddy Honeychurch invites George Emerson to the family home to play which game?
Tennis
Tennis brings George back to Lucy's garden, and Cecil's sneering refusal to make up a game that evening is the last straw. She ends their engagement the same night.
Q 08Which actress, later M in the James Bond films, played novelist Eleanor Lavish in the 1985 film A Room with a View?
Judi Dench
Judi Dench won a BAFTA for the part, though she and the director fell out on set when he suggested she play the novelist as a Scot.
Q 09Which Crazy Rich Asians author reset A Room with a View among jet-set millionaires in the 2020 novel Sex and Vanity?
Kevin Kwan
Kevin Kwan moved the story to Capri and the Hamptons, where Lucie Churchill is engaged to the new-money Cecil Pike but drawn to a surfer called George.
Q 10Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy's older cousin, travels with her to Italy in A Room with a View in what official role?
Chaperone
Chaperone is the job Charlotte takes with martyred seriousness, yet George still kisses Lucy on her watch. Charlotte frets mostly about her own failure.
Q 11Which famous brand of guidebook does Miss Lavish take from Lucy, leaving her lost in Florence in A Room with a View?
Baedeker
Baedeker guides were so standard that travel handbooks in general took the German firm's name. Miss Lavish confiscates Lucy's, gets them both lost, then wanders off still holding it.
Q 12In A Room with a View, which instrument does Lucy Honeychurch play with a passion she never shows in conversation?
The piano
The piano is where Lucy stops being polite. The vicar who hears her predicts that life will become very exciting if she ever starts to live the way she plays.
Q 13Which Oliver Stone film beat A Room with a View to Best Picture after the two tied for the most Oscar nominations?
Platoon
Q 21In A Room with a View, Lucy is stranded with no guidebook outside which great Franciscan church in Florence?
Santa Croce
Santa Croce holds the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo, yet with no guide to hand Lucy cannot tell what she is meant to admire, until the Emersons take her round.
Q 22In A Room with a View, a carriage outing to which hill town above Florence ends with George kissing Lucy?
Fiesole
Fiesole is where Lucy's shaky Italian misleads her carriage driver: asked to find the vicar, he delivers her straight to George instead.
Q 23What is the name of the Honeychurch family home, built by Lucy's late father, in A Room with a View?
Windy Corner
Platoon and Forster's Edwardian romance had eight nominations each. The Vietnam drama won four, including Best Picture, and the romance went home with three.
Q 14Which American director, Ismail Merchant's partner in a famous filmmaking duo, made the 1985 film A Room with a View?
James Ivory
James Ivory was keener on the book than his partners were, and it earned him a Best Director nomination. He finally won an Oscar at 89, for writing Call Me by Your Name.
Q 15In A Room with a View, which blood-spattered belongings of Lucy's does George Emerson throw into the river?
Her photographs
Her photographs, souvenir pictures of famous paintings, had fallen beside the dying man. George's flustered confession that he threw them away strikes Lucy as boyish.
Q 16After breaking her engagement in A Room with a View, Lucy plans to escape to which country with the Miss Alans?
Greece
Greece is where the two elderly sisters are bound, and Lucy begs to tag along rather than face her feelings. A talk with old Mr Emerson stops her before she sails.
Q 17In A Room with a View, Charlotte hurries Lucy away from Florence to which city the day after George's kiss?
Rome
Rome is where they join the Vyse family, and where Lucy gets to know Cecil better. She turns down two proposals from him abroad before accepting a third at home.
Q 18E. M. Forster, author of A Room with a View, belonged to which London circle that included Virginia Woolf?
Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group friends turned their backs on Victorian convention in favour of personal relationships and pleasure, the very choice Forster hands Lucy.
Q 19The 1985 film A Room with a View made famous use of the aria O mio babbino caro, by which Italian composer?
Puccini
Puccini wrote it for Gianni Schicchi, a comic opera that is itself set in Florence, where a daughter pleads with her father over the boy she loves.
Q 20In E. M. Forster's novel A Room with a View, George first kisses Lucy on a hillside covered in which flowers?
Violets
Violets pour down the hillside where George kisses her in the book. The 1985 film moved the kiss to a poppy field instead.
Windy Corner was put up as a speculation by Lucy's father, a local solicitor, who fell for his own creation and ended up living in it himself.
Q 24In A Room with a View, Lucy returns from Italy to her family's home in which county south of London?
Surrey
Surrey was also home to Forster himself, who finished all six of his novels in Weybridge. The 1985 film, though, shot its English scenes over the border in Kent.
Q 25Which actor, Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones films, was Oscar-nominated as Mr Emerson in A Room with a View?
Denholm Elliott
Denholm Elliott played the blunt, big-hearted father who offers two strangers his room. He lost the Oscar to Michael Caine in Hannah and Her Sisters.
Q 26Which actor, later Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, played the Reverend Mr Beebe in A Room with a View?
Simon Callow
Simon Callow had been the director's pick for an earlier film but was tied to a West End play. As the vicar he strips off for the famous swim in the woods.
Q 27Which E. M. Forster novel, his next after A Room with a View, won Emma Thompson an Oscar when filmed in 1992?
Howards End
Howards End was filmed by the same team that made A Room with a View, and its house is modelled on Rooks Nest, where Forster spent his childhood.
Q 28In A Room with a View, the Signora who runs Lucy's Italian pensione dismays her by speaking with which accent?
Cockney
Cockney vowels are the last thing Lucy expected to hear in Florence, and with English guests at every table she complains that she might as well be in London.
Q 29In A Room with a View, Lucy's stormy playing of which composer convinces the vicar that she has hidden depths?
Beethoven
Beethoven's final sonata, Opus 111, is what the vicar first heard her attack at a parish entertainment, where he had expected something far tamer.
Q 30What name do the Honeychurches give the woodland pond where Freddy, George and the vicar bathe in A Room with a View?
The Sacred Lake
The Sacred Lake is little more than a puddle, as Lucy admits. For the 1985 film the crew dug an artificial pond in the woods to stage the naked swim.