A Room with a View is a novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant-Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985. The Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (1998). A Room with a View had a lengthy gestation. By late 1902 Forster was working on a novel set in Italy which he called the 'Lucy novel'. In 1903 and 1904 he pushed it aside to work on other projects. He was still revising it in 1908.