Worth Reading: Howards End

Howards End by E.M. Forster (1910)

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

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If A Room With a View is comedy and romance, then Howards End is its tragic counterpart. This novel examines the social and cultural changes occurring in England during the early 1900s, such as the rise of the bourgeois class, the plight of workers, the call for women’s rights, the urbanization of England and the transition to the automobile.

There are three principal groups of characters, each representing a different social strata. The Schlegels — principally the older sisters, Margaret and Helen — are members of the leisure class, having old money and intellectual rather than professional pursuits. The Wilcoxes represent the rising middle class. And the Basts are working class, living on the edge of extreme poverty, at the mercy of those above them. These three families, thrown together by the cultural shifts happening around them, entangle their lives, with tragic consequences.

However, all of these characters share a flaw, which directly contributes to the tragedy. They all isolate themselves, a pervasive modern problem that Forster presciently portrays here. No character has a real community or sense of belonging. The Schlegels, particularly Margaret, separate themselves via their eccentricities, their insular family life and their intellectual pursuits, which help them avoid emotional entanglements. But the sisters, at least, long for connection. Margaret wants to belong to a community; Helen craves romance. Yet they keep failing to find the connection they seek. The Wilcoxes hold themselves aloof with their antiquated social principles, their hasty judgments of others and their unspoken sense of inferiority to the moneyed upper classes. Leonard Bast is separated not only by his class, but by his refusal to settle for his lot in life, which he is told he must accept. He tries to hold himself to an ideal he has only read about in novels, which leads him into a marriage that he know will be bad and that estranges him from his family.

That is why the novel begins and ends with a house: Howards End. It isn’t a grand estate, but it represents a sense of continuity and belonging, of something that will endure. The Shlegel girls instinctively feel at home at Howards End, and the Wilcoxes are loathe to give it up, even though they don’t really value it. When Margaret forms a rare true connection with the first Mrs. Wilcox, she wants to leave Margaret Howards End, because she understands its importance and feels that Margaret will likewise value it, protect it and pass it on. In a world of change and upheaval, Howards End is a constant, and lives that are lived there, however quiet, are meaningful lives.

Howards End is not as much of a pleasure to read as A Room With a View. There are certainly passages where Forster wanders off into obtuseness or inserts too much authorial opinion. But it’s a valuable book to read, to understand this time in history, and perhaps even shed some light on our modern discontents.

For more:

• Howards End at Project Gutenberg
• Wikipedia article
• Study guide