Critically, A Room with a View has been treated as a fine example of travel literature, character development, satire, comedy, writing style, and a modernization of ancient myths. Forster's novel was immediately popular with readers and early reviewers praised the novel, enjoying the Jane Austen-style observation of human society. Acclaim began with a review in the Morning Leader (October 30, 1908) which declared the work the best of the year. C. F. G. Masterman's review in The Nation plugged the work because it deftly satirized Edwardian England. Virginia Woolf, writing for the Times Literary Supplement in her article "The Novels of E. M. Forster," and collected in The Death of the Moth and other Essays, declared the book a wonder for its beauty. However, Forster's friend also criticized Forster's characters as unsatisfying. Later critics have not agreed with Woolf.

Writing almost sixty years later, Jeffrey Meyers thought the...