Howards End
Howards End
by E. M. Forster
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel, set in England, during the early 1900s; published in 1910.
SYNOPSIS
A country house plays a pivotal role in the intertwined lives of two middle-class families and a struggaling clerk.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Born in London in 1879, Edward Morgan Forster was the only son of the architect Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster and Alice Clara Whichelo. The future novelist was only one year old when his father died of tuberculosis; in 1882, the infant Forster and his mother moved to Rooksnest, a country house in Hertfordshire, where he was brought up by his mother and paternal aunts. Forster attended Tonbridge School as a day pupil, later matriculating at King’s College, Cambridge University. From 1900 to 1901, he traveled with his mother extensively throughout Europe, including Italy, Sicily, and Austria. In 1902 he took a position as an instructor with the Working Men’s College in London, while pursuing publication as an author. His first short story “Albergo Empedocle” was printed the following year in the literary journal Temple Bar. Forster also contributed essays and short stories to the newly founded Independent Review. His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was published in 1905, and was followed in quick succession by The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908). Howards End, his fourth novel and first major success, was published in 1910. During World War I, Forster spent three years as a civilian war worker in Egypt. Two visits to India, in 1912 and 1921, led to his highly lauded novel A Passage to lndia (1910). During World War II, Forster won respect for his lack of sympathy with all forms of totalitarianism, and in 1946 he received an honorary fellowship that enabled him to live in Cambridge. Forster died in Coventry, England, in 1970. Among his other achievements, Howard’s End had established him as a master of domestic realism in his time.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
The Edwardian Age—an overview
Queen Victoria’s 64-year reign ended with her death in 1901; her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, succeeded her as Edward VII. Although the new king of England was close to 60 years old when he took the throne and was to rule only until 1910, during his brief reign he nonetheless left his own mark on the age. After the horrors of World War I (1914-18), the English looked back on the Edwardian Age as a golden time of ease, luxury, lavish display, and perpetual sunshine. While this nostalgic view may have been true for the wealthy, titled, and socially ambitious who found their way into the king’s social circle, matters were quite different for political activists, lower class workers, and the struggling poor. Literary scholar Alistair M. Duckworth describes the Edwardian period as “a time of social and political strife,” marked by bitter conflicts between Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists, between organized labor and management, between militant suffragists and men equally determined to deny women the voting franchise (Duckworth, p. 3).
The international picture of the time was likewise troubled. Edward VII had assumed the throne in the midst of an international conflict. The Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899-1902), also called the Second War of Liberation, divided Britons at home and exposed British soldiers to the horrors of trench warfare for the first time. Even more ominously, Britain’s relations with Germany were becoming increasingly tense and volatile. The British War Office and Admiralty, both of which regarded Germany’s expansionist policies with alarm, committed Britain to a costly armaments race in anticipation of German threats. Britain’s fears would be realized with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.
For better and for worse, the Edwardian Age was also a period of industrial development and rapid urban growth. At the turn of the century, most of Britain’s wealth as a nation was derived from trade and industry rather than from agriculture, although large landowners and aristocrats continued to dominate British government and society. The British themselves had become an urban people: according to the census of 1901, over 25 million people lived in towns, 4.5 million of them in London alone. Ten years later, 41 percent of the population of England and Wales were recorded as living in such industrial areas as London, South-East Lancashire, Mersey-side, the West Midlands, and West Yorkshire (Cecil, p. 43). As more displaced rural workers drifted into the cities in search of employment and housing, the already wretched quality of the overpacked slums and tenements deteriorated still further. Cities were simply not prepared to accommodate the influx of migrant workers; during the 1900s, there was a 15 percent decline in the construction of new housing, despite the acute need for it. Although the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 enabled local authorities to demolish slum property and rebuild, overcrowding continued to be a problem well into the 1910s.
Meanwhile, the metropolis, especially London, was undergoing a rapid expansion, a trend that had begun in the previous century and only accelerated during the dozen or so years leading up to the First World War. A novelist of the time, Frank Swinnerton, speculated as to whether London’s urban sprawl would eventually extend throughout the southern counties and obliterate rural England entirely. Swinnerton even anticipated that the tall houses in the heart of London would have to be demolished and their place taken by “enormous blocks of flats and dwellings ‘built with some beauty’” (Pearsall, p. 57).
Technology also kept pace with the times, as the motorcar—initially a luxury only the rich could afford—became a more familiar sight on British roads, and the flying machine—the prototype of the modern airplane—presented exciting new possibilities in transportation. Although Howards End is a novel of character rather than of historical incident, Forster nonetheless imbues his novel with the issues of the Edwardian period, from the impact of motorcars cherished by the materialistic Wilcoxes, to the relentless urban expansion of London that eventually claims the Schlegels’ family home, to the financial struggles of Leonard Bast, who ultimately finds himself unemployed and adrift in a society marked by conspicuous and extravagant display.
The Edwardian middle class
Like that of the nineteenth century, the British social structure of the early twentieth century was hierarchical. Most Edwardians tended to think of their society as divided into three classes—an aristocratic upper class; a middle class made up of lawyers, physicians, and merchants; and a lower class consisting of laborers and poor workmen. During the Edwardian period, however, the middle class underwent a significant expansion in several ways.
There was a noticeable proliferation of the “lower middle class”: that army of clerks and office workers who were neither factory laborers nor factory owners but who merged into the working class beneath and the prosperous middle class above. There was a pronounced growth of the professions: those lawyers, doctors, teachers, and civil servants whose numbers, qualifications, and incomes were all expanding rapidly at this time. And there was a new plutocracy of super-rich bankers, financiers, and businessmen that emerged (or bought its way) into the traditional aristocracy.
Cannadine, pp. 120-121)
As the era progressed, more and more people began to fall under the umbrella title of “middle class,” despite vast differences in income, occupation, and way of life.
Such diversity often created its own problems within class strata. According to author J.B. Priestley, who grew up during the Edwardian Age, most contemporary tensions originated among this increasingly populous and diverse middle class. Lacking the confidence of their Victorian predecessors, Priestly argues, middle-class Edwardians were quick to denounce startling or unconventional new ideas—artistic, religious, political—that posed a potential challenge to their safely ordered world:
The members of the upper middle class felt that property and position were being threatened. In the lower middle class respectability itself, often newly won, had to be guarded. There was a feeling that religion, the family, decency, social and political stability, the country itself, were all in danger … during these years the English middle classes were at war with themselves. This odd conflict did much to give the Edwardian Age its peculiar character.
(Priestley, p. 87)
Forster demonstrates his own awareness of middle-class tensions and diversity in Howards End. Indeed, his major characters all embody different subcategories of the middle class: the super-rich Wilcoxes amass their wealth through Mr. Wilcox’s business acumen, the idealistic Schlegels lead a cultured existence made possible by sound investments and an independent income, while at the lower end of the spectrum, Leonard Bast toils as a clerk, barely managing to hang on to his hard-won middle-class status. Mutual tolerance between these characters proves difficult, and, in some cases, impossible to achieve. Disillusioned early by the Wilcoxes, Helen Schlegel detests them for their dedication to
THE MOTORING AGE
First introduced in Britain in the 1890s, the motorcar quickly became the ultimate status symbol for wealthy Edwardians. Most models came from France or Germany, such as the petrol-driven, 4 hp (horsepower) Panhard & Lavassor car that the Honorable Evelyn Ellis purchased In 1895, A devotee of this new vehicle, Ellis backed the motoring industry in Britain with about 20,000 pounds of his own money. Ellis, along with J. A. Koosen—who owned another variety, the Lutzmann—and Sir David Salomons, became one of the country’s earliest and best-known motorists. Exhibitions, motor shows, and the press further exposed motorcars to the public. In November 1895, Autocar magazine was founded, in anticipation of an interested readership. A year later, the speed limit on British roads was increased from 4 mph to 12 mph, to the delight of new motorists and the dismay oí law enforcement officers. The motoring craze escalated in the early years of the twentieth century: in 1904, there were apparently 24,201 cars registered in the United Kingdom, one-third of them in London alone (Pearsall, p. 134). Two years later, that number had almost doubled; again, it was only the rich who could afford to purchase and maintain this new toy at first. “The Edwardian car,” writes one historian, “was expensive to buy, complicated and costly to run.... No gentleman could be expected to mess around in the crude smoking interior of a motor-car, and the new domestic was introduced, the motor servant” (Pearsall, pp. 130-131). His services were frequently invoked, for the Edwardian car tended to be unreliable—tires were continually getting punctured, the engine frequently overheated, and pistons were easily ruined. As the decade progressed and technology advanced, however, sturdier, faster motorcars were built, and motoring enthusiasts eagerly traded in their old cars for bright new models, such as Rolls-Royce’s Silver Ghost.
the outer life of “telegrams and anger” at the expense of human feelings (Forster, Howards End, p. 28); meanwhile, the Wilcox children regard the Schlegels with deep suspicion, especially after Margaret becomes engaged to their father; and the wretched Leonard Bast is ultimately destroyed through his interactions with both families.
Women, property, and inheritance
From Norman times—the late eleventh century—the English Crown encouraged landholders to leave their property to one heir, usually the eldest son, in order to keep the land intact so it could economically support a military force that could come to the aid of the king. This practice, which became known as primogeniture, remained the norm among English landowners for the next 800 years. By the nineteenth century, the Crown had since found other means of protection and support, but landed families still considered primogeniture a means of preserving their name and ancestral greatness, an attitude that persisted until the early twentieth century and was upheld by the legal courts: “So powerful was the hold of the idea [of primogeniture] that, until 1925, by law the land of someone dying without a will went to the eldest son, and middle-class efforts to change the law and have the land divided among all the children were consistently defeated by the old families” (Pool, p. 90).
As a general rule, girls did not inherit the great estates because the line could die out if they remained single, while if they wed, the property would pass to a male outside the family. Having to leave the premises when the new heir took up residence was often a traumatic experience for a woman who had long been attached to the family home (see Sense and Sensibility in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). However, among the middle and lower classes, women could conceivably inherit the family property, as Ruth Wilcox—formerly Howard—does, in the absence of any surviving male heirs. In Forster’s novel, the Howards are presented as belonging to the yeomanry—gentlemen farmers and small landholders—who were a dying breed in the late nineteenth century. Owing to the economic pressures of the Victorian Age (foreign competition, rising agricultural costs, etc.), many yeomen lost their land, descending to the level of rural laborers or becoming tenant farmers to the owners of the large country estates. The Howards’ fate is poignantly implied by the very name of their farm, Howards End. As Miss Avery, the old housekeeper, tells Margaret, the second Mrs. Wilcox, “Things went on [at Howards’ End] until there were no men [left]” (Howards End, p. 287).
With the death of Ruth Wilcox, ownership of Howards End passes to her widower, Henry, again an accepted and established custom of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Traditionally, a woman’s property legally became her husband’s upon marriage. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the law gradually increased wives’ powers over their possessions. The passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870, 1882, and 1893, in turn, granted wives full rights over
- Their own earnings after marriage and over money they were willed by others
- Property they acquired by their own efforts
- All their own property so that husbands had no rights over anything legally owned by their wives
The Acts also gave women the rights to sue and be sued over property and to enter into property contracts. In the novel, the dying Mrs. Ruth Wilcox seeks to distribute her own property as she pleases, by choosing Margaret Schlegel as the next owner of her beloved Howards End. The unconventional nature of her bequest—a brief note, scribbled in pencil, informing her husband of her wishes—leads her surviving family to disregard her desires and destroy the note.
Sexuality
Ironically, despite the dawn of a new age and the accession of a new monarch, Edwardian attitudes towards sexuality remained largely unchanged from those of the Victorian Age, a circumstance that author Duncan Crow terms “hardly surprising, because the change of a century or the death of a statute does not necessarily invoke a whole new personality in the psyche of a nation” (Crow, p. 171). The same sexual double standard that had prevailed in the nineteenth century was firmly in place during the early twentieth century. Proper young ladies of the middle and upper classes were still expected to have no sexual experience or contact before marriage—during courtship, “a hand around the waist, a kiss, and a fervent pressing of the hand was probably the accepted limit in most cases” (Pool, p. 187). Moreover, the prevailing view, as put forth by Dr. William Acton in the mid-1860s, held that “the majority of women are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind” (Acton in Pool, p. 186). A Scottish gynecologist attempted to refute that claim in the 1890s, reporting that, out of the 190 women who responded to his questions (his original sample consisted of 504 women), 152 admitted that they did have sexual desires, while 134 even admitted that they had orgasms (Pool, 187). Nonetheless, many Victorian and Edwardian men remained convinced that only “harlots” enjoyed the sex act, while “pure women” dreaded it. Certainly, ignorance of sexual matters did not contribute to a proper young woman’s enjoyment of intercourse: most brides went to their wedding nights ill-prepared and frightened.
Abstinence and chastity were not, however, demanded of upper and middle-class men, many of whom engaged in dalliance with domestic servants and lower-class prostitutes. Discretion was expected, however—illicit sexual adventures had to be concealed at all costs: “This was, indeed, the crux of Edwardian morality. To those who could avoid being found out almost everything was permitted. If your vice or indiscretion was exposed, ostracism of some kind was sure to follow” (Cecil, p. 162). The outrageousness of this double standard is illustrated in Forster’s novel: the unmarried, pregnant Helen Schlegel is shunned by her brother-in-law, Henry Wilcox, who has himself been unfaithful to his first wife. As Helen’s enraged sister, Margaret—Henry’s second wife—points out, “You have had a mistress—I forgave you! My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead” (Howards End, p. 322).
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
The novel begins with a series of letters written by Helen Schlegel to her older sister, Margaret. While vacationing in Germany the previous spring, the earnest, idealistic Schlegel sisters had made the acquaintance of the prosperous Wilcox family, who later invited the Schlegels to visit them at their country house, Howards End, in Hertfordshire, England. Margaret declines the invitation because she must nurse her ailing brother, Tibby, but Helen accepts. While staying at Howards End, Helen becomes enchanted with the Wilcoxes—the forceful patriarch, Henry; his quiet, self-contained wife, Ruth; and their grown children, Charles, Evie, and Paul. Helen and Paul, the younger son, fall in love, but Helen’s ardor cools when she sees how willing Paul is to back off because he fears his family’s disapproval. Unfortunately, Helen has already written to Margaret about her feelings for Paul, news that sends the sisters’ interfering Aunt Juley down to Hertsfordshire to discuss the matter with Helen herself. An awkward situation subsequently arises, which is partially smoothed over by Mrs. Wilcox. An embarrassed Helen returns to London, having lost her illusions about the Wilcoxes, and the acquaintance between the families cools.
Some months later, the Schlegels also meet Leonard Bast, whose umbrella Helen absent-mindedly filches at a concert both are attending. When Leonard calls to retrieve his umbrella at the Schlegels’ house, the sisters take a keen interest in the young man, especially after they learn that he has intellectual aspirations and wishes to improve himself. Bast, for his part, comes to idealize the cultured Schlegels and despairs of being able to rise above his poverty or disentangle himself from his relationship with Jacky, a vulgar, older woman he has promised to marry. An intellectual from Germany, Herr Schlegel had married an Englishwoman and landed a position as a teacher at a local university, which helps explain his children’s cultured upbringing. Meanwhile, the Wilcoxes have come to London for Charles Wilcox’s wedding and, co-incidentally, rented a flat just opposite the Schlegel home. Although Helen no longer loves Paul, she decides to visit cousins in Germany to avoid an awkward meeting. Mrs. Wilcox, however, informs Margaret that Paul has gone to Nigeria so the former lovers will not encounter each other. What Paul does in Nigeria, which by then had been colonized by the British, remains obscure.
Despite their different interests and personalities, Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret become friends. Mrs. Wilcox is especially sympathetic when she hears the Schlegels will eventually have to leave their London home when their lease expires she invites Margaret to visit her beloved Howards End. Before they can carry out their plans, Mrs. Wilcox falls ill and dies. During her final days, however, Mrs. Wilcox scribbles a note to her husband in which she expresses her wish that Margaret have Howards End. Astonished and rather offended by Mrs. Wilcox’s bequest to a stranger, the Wilcoxes decide to discard the note without telling Margaret of its existence.
Two years pass, during which the Schlegels become slightly better acquainted with Leonard Bast, now married to Jacky and still doggedly pursuing the acquisition of culture. The sisters sense something genuine in Leonard’s spirit, despite his intellectual posturing, and determine to find some way to help him. One evening in London, the sisters unexpectedly encounter Mr. Wilcox again and the subject of Leonard Bast comes up. Mr. Wilcox passes along the information that the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, at which Bast is employed as a clerk, is unstable and that Bast should find another position elsewhere. The sisters pass along Mr. Wilcox’s advice to Leonard, who resents their interference but adopts their suggestion nonetheless.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wilcox begins to take an interest in Margaret, actively seeking her company. When he learns she and her siblings will soon have to leave their home and have not found a suitable replacement, he offers them the lease of his own London house, which he has decided to give up when his daughter Evie marries. Margaret goes with Mr. Wilcox to inspect the house; while they are there, Mr. Wilcox makes a proposal of marriage that Margaret, after some reflection, accepts. A horrified Helen tries to dissuade her sister, but Margaret remains determined to marry Mr. Wilcox, even though she recognizes his emotional and spiritual limitations. He is embarrassed by passionate feelings and overly concerned with appearances.
While visiting Mr. Wilcox’s married son, Charles, and his wife Dolly in the country, Margaret gets her first sight of Howards End, deserted by a tenant who has now gone abroad. While exploring the neglected house, Margaret briefly encounters Miss Avery, the old housekeeper, who informs her that she has the late Ruth Wilcox’s “way of walking” (Howards End, p. 211). Although startled by this meeting, Margaret soon dismisses it from her mind as preparations for Evie Wilcox’s wedding—to be held at another family property, Oniton Grange near Salisbury—begin.
On the day of the wedding, however, an outraged Helen, with Leonard and Jacky Bast in tow, barges in on the reception. Helen, who kept in touch with Leonard through correspondence, angrily reveals to Margaret that Leonard has lost everything, including his new position at Dempster’s bank, through the bad business advice of the Schlegels and Mr. Wilcox. Leonard had left his former place of employment based on advice from Wilcox that the company would founder, but it did not, and Dempster’s bank had fired him. Helen demands that Mr. Wilcox make financial restitution to Leonard. Annoyed by her sister’s outburst, Margaret nonetheless agrees to intercede for the young man, but after she persuades Mr. Wilcox to meet the Basts, a tipsy Jacky reveals that she was Mr. Wilcox’s mistress ten years before. Mortified, Mr. Wilcox offers to release Margaret from their engagement, but she forgives him, reasoning that it was his late wife, not herself, who had suffered from his indiscretion. Margaret decides that, under the circumstances, Mr. Wilcox should not be expected to help the Basts and writes a note to Helen, who is staying with Leonard and Jacky at a local hotel, informing her of this decision. Helen and Leonard are sitting together in the hotel coffee room when the bad news arrives that evening.
The next morning, Margaret learns to her dismay that Helen and the Basts have left the hotel separately, leaving no clue as to their whereabouts. Meanwhile, a distraught Helen visits her brother Tibby, now at Oxford, informs him of what happened at Oniton Grange, and asks him to send a large sum of money—made over from her personal fortune—to the Basts, as she is about to go abroad. Tibby obeys, but the money is quickly returned, and on following up the situation at Helen’s request, Tibby learns that the Basts have been evicted from their home and disappeared.
Soon after Evie’s wedding, Margaret and Mr. Wilcox marry quietly and have a honeymoon in Innsbruck, Austria. Margaret hopes for a meeting with her sister, but Helen remains elusive. Returning to England, the newlyweds search for a permanent country home since Mr. Wilcox has decided to let Oniton Grange. Not long after their return, Margaret learns from her husband’s daughter-in-law Dolly Wilcox that the Schlegels’ furniture, which has been stored at the deserted Howards End since the demolishment of the Schlegels’ home, has been mistakenly unpacked and set up in the house. Traveling down to Hertfordshire to straighten out the situation, Margaret again encounters the housekeeper Miss Avery, who tells her more about the house and the Howards, while calmly refusing to believe Margaret’s claim that she will not be living at Howards End. After her visit, Margaret resolves to have all the furniture repacked and sent to a warehouse, but her plans are upset when her Aunt Juley falls seriously ill.
After a long period of nursing, Aunt Juley recovers but Margaret and Tibby are disturbed by Helen’s continued absence from England, which has now lasted eight months. Margaret’s anxiety increases when Helen does return to England but still avoids a direct meeting. In desperation, Margaret colludes with Mr. Wilcox to force a meeting by luring Helen down to Howards End to pick up some of her books. When Margaret surprises Helen at the house, she sees that her sister is pregnant.
Shocked by Helen’s situation, Mr. Wilcox and his son, Charles, demand to know the identity of the baby’s father, but Margaret shields her sister from their prying. Alone, Helen confesses to Margaret that her child is the result of a night spent with Leonard Bast. She also tells Margaret that she is going abroad for the birth but asks if she can spend one night at Howards End with her sister. Margaret passes along Helen’s request to Mr. Wilcox, who refuses to allow a “fallen woman” to stay in his late wife’s house. Furious, Margaret berates her husband for his hypocrisy and his inability to see the similarity between his transgression and Helen’s. She then leaves him, returning to Helen at Howards End.
The following day, two more people converge on Howards End: Leonard Bast, who, guilt-ridden over his night with Helen, wishes to confess his sin to Margaret and Charles Wilcox, who is determined to evict the sisters from the house. Owing to an inadvertent slip on the part of Tibby, whom Charles visited the previous day, the younger Wilcox has deduced the identity of Helen’s lover. Seeing Leonard at Howards End, Charles seizes an old German sword belonging to the Schlegels and beats Leonard with the flat of it. Reeling from the blows, Leonard pulls the bookcase down on top of himself. Once extricated, he is discovered to be dead. Although doctors declare that Leonard’s death was due to heart disease, Charles is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. Broken by his son’s disgrace, Mr. Wilcox turns to his estranged wife for comfort. Despite having planned to leave England with Helen, Margaret moves her brokenhearted husband and sister into Howards End.
Fourteen months later, Margaret, Mr. Wilcox, Helen and her baby are still living at Howards End and have managed to become a family. Mr. Wilcox assembles his children at the house to inform them of the terms of his new will: all his money will be divided among his offspring, but Howards End will go to Margaret, and after her death, to her nephew, Helen’s son. The Wilcox children accept the terms and take their leave. The novel ends with Margaret’s chance discovery that Ruth Wilcox had always intended her to have Howards End and with the triumphant cutting of hay in the Hertfordshire meadow.
Home, sweet home
Howards End itself is as much a character in Forster’s novel as the Wilcoxes and Schlegels. Indeed, much of the story’s action focuses on the process of finding a suitable home—throughout the novel, houses are purchased, furnished, abandoned, demolished, and, in the case of Howards End, rediscovered and brought to life again.
The unique nature of Howards End—originally a Hertfordshire farmhouse—is established in Helen’s first letter to Margaret, in which she describes the house as “old, and little, and altogether delightful—red brick” and not at all the kind of dwelling they would expect the Wilcoxes to own (Howards End, p. 3). Further details of
“ONLY CONNECT…”
Forster’s famous epigraph—the literary motto—that serves as a prelude to Howards End has elicited considerable critical commentary. Literary scholar Claude J. Summers argues that “the idea of connection fuels the novel’s attempts to fuse into wholeness individuals divided within themselves and a society equally fragmented and to reconcile the various dualities of existence: the inner life and the outer life, the past and the present, the body and the soul, the masculine and the feminine, the city and the country, the visible and the invisible, the prose and the passion, life and death” (Summers, pp. 106-107). Similarly, Alistair M. Duckworth contends that the epigraph “expresses a wish—for the emergence of a just, harmonious, and whole society—and îl acknowledges that the Edwardian world was disconnected at the social, political, economic, cultural, and sexual levels” (Duckworth, p. 8). The character in the novel who most embodies this philosophy and hope for connection is Margaret Schlegel, whose unexpected love for Henry Wilcox leads her to attempt to bridge the chasm between their disparate worlds and values: “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. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die” (Howards End, p. 195). Firmly believing that personal relations are the basis of meaningful human existence, Margaret is stunned and appalled to learn that her new husband cannot connect, that he refuses to see any parallel between his infidelity to the first Mrs. Wilcox and Helen’s pregnancy by a married lover. Henry’s inability to “connect” causes Margaret to leave him, and only a greater tragedy—the sudden death of Leonard Bast and Charles Wilcox’s imprisonment as his killer—can reunite them.
the house’s history—its wide meadow and great wych-elm tree—are provided by Ruth Wilcox who inherited Howards End after the deaths of all the male heirs. As her friendship with Ruth develops, Margaret Schlegel discovers “that Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only one passion in life—her house—and that the moment was solemn when she invited a friend to share this passion with her” (Howards End, p. 89).
Indeed, it is Mrs. Wilcox’s devotion to Howards End that allows her to sympathize so completely with the Schlegels when she hears that their London house is to be torn down to make room for a block of flats: “To be parted from your house, your father’s house—it oughtn’t to be allowed. It is worse than dying…. Oh, poor girls! Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?” (Howards End, p. 86). Love for Howards End also prompts the dying Wilcox matriarch to leave the house to Margaret rather than to her own uncomprehending family: “To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (Howards End, p. 103). Unaware of her late friend’s bequest for most of the novel, Margaret is nonetheless recognized as Mrs. Wilcox’s “spiritual heir” by old Miss Avery, former housekeeper of Howards End, who unpacks the Schlegels’ old furniture in full expectation of their future residence there: “You think you won’t come back to live here, Mrs. Wilcox, but you will” (Howards End, p. 284).
Ruth Wilcox’s passion for her country home—a passion that her successor, Margaret, comes to share—hearkens back to the Victorian period, in which a home was considered a haven and a refuge from the cares and pressures of the outside world. The passion for the English countryside, however, has taken on a new intensity; it acquired a heightened keenness during the Edwardian Age. The well-to-do often tried to maintain a place in the country as well as in the town; the construction of the railroads throughout the nineteenth century had made it possible for city-dwellers to visit their country homes for the weekend and be back in town by Monday. Certainly the stay was reward enough for the trouble of the journey there: “In terms of the picturesque the countryside was at its best during the period, and townees sought succour and inspiration amidst flora and fauna” (Pearsall, p. 118).
For farmers, yeomen, and poor rural laborers, country life was rather less idyllic. Agriculture had been steadily losing ground as an industry since the 1880s and 1890s; the monetary value of land had fallen dramatically. A 700-acre Wiltshire farm, worth 27,000 pounds in 1812, sold for only 7,000 pounds in 1892 (Pearsall, p. 121). After 1871, farms also suffered from a diminished supply of laborers, many of whom, as noted, flocked to industrial cities to work in mills and factories. Finally, the countryside itself was under attack, as the growing suburbs of large towns encroached upon hill and meadowland. At the end of Forster’s novel, Helen points out “a red rust” in the distance and wistfully observes “London’s creeping” towards Howards End, a circumstance that even the optimistic Margaret cannot deny (Howards End, p. 355). Significantly, the knowledge of what is coming only makes the Schlegels—like their real-life contemporaries—value what they have even more: “The Edwardian period was one in which many people looked on the English countryside with new eyes; some knew it would never be so beautiful again” (Cecil, p. 131).
Sources and literary context
As early as 1908 Forster had begun thinking about the novel that would eventually become Howards End. He had already considered the idea of a plot involving two cultured, idealistic sisters, one of whom would wed a businessman and face a troubled marriage. Forster numbered among his acquaintances several intellectual women who provided partial inspiration for these characters, including the three sisters of Cambridge instructor Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and the Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia (who later became the novelist Virginia Woolf; see Mrs. Dalloway , also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Forster also drew on his own experiences in Germany as a tutor to Countess Von Arnheim’s children in 1905, who provided the German origins of the Schlegels. Arguably, the most autobiographical of Forster’s sources for the novel was the country house, Rooksnest, in Hertfordshire, where Forster lived for much of his boyhood and which served as the model for Howards End.
Forster’s novel is often considered an example of the English realistic tradition in its attempt to convey the details of Edwardian life as the author experienced them. Forster himself was an admirer of such realistic novelists as George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray (see Middle-march and Vanity Fair in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature of Its Times). Yet Howards End may also be read as a comic satire on the values and foibles of the middle class, which is represented in all its diverse aspects by the materialistic Wilcoxes, the idealistic Schlegels, and the struggling Leonard Bast. Looking at the novel from yet another vantage point, literary scholar Frederick P. McDowell calls Howards End “the quintessential Bloomsbury novel”; the reference here is to a group of Edwardian writers and thinkers, many of whom were Forster’s acquaintances. They used to meet for intellectual discussions at 46 Gordon Street in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, laying “stress upon the overriding importance of personal relationships” and placing “high valuation” on art and culture (McDowell, p. 65). Moreover, Forster’s heroine, Margaret Schlegel, could be considered the “quintessential Bloomsbury intellectual,” owing to her habit of “skeptically and rationally testing social and philosophical values and balancing the polarities of the objectively real and the visionary” (McDowell, p. 65).
Reviews
Howards End was favorably received from the outset of its publication. Most critics expressed admiration for Forster’s attention to detail and ability to convey believable emotional states. A. N. Monkhouse, writing for the Manchester Guardian called Howards End “a novel of high quality written with what appears to be a feminine brilliance of perception…. It is always a humane presentment of real men and women even when their doings surprise us into some kind of protest” (Monkhouse in Gardner, pp. 123-124). A reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement similarly declared, “Mr. E. M. Forster … has written a book in which his highly original talent has found full and ripe expression,” adding, “where quick-fingered lightness and deftness are demanded, there Mr. Forster never fails; and he has caught in this book a sensitive reflection of life on which he is very heartily to be congratulated” (Gardner, pp. 125-126).
Critics were also taken with Forster’s characters. A reviewer for The Standard singled out the Schlegel sisters, Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox, and Leonard Bast as “wonderfully rendered” and contended that “[w]ith this book [Forster] seems to us to have arrived, and if he never writes another line, his niche should be secure” (Gardner, p. 129). There were, however, some quibbles regarding Forster’s plot, especially the sexual encounter between Helen and Leonard, which a reviewer for The Daily Telegraph complained “strikes a false note” because “[wie do not feel that it is inevitable, but that it is the author’s will, and that he is doing violence to his characters in bringing it about” (Gardner, p. 131). Similarly, a reviewer for the Daily Graphic observed that “the ending is brought about, or at any rate is accompanied, by incidents which, in any other juxtaposition, we should call sensational; and which in their sober surroundings have a disturbing crudity” (Gardner, p. 146).
Nonetheless, the general consensus on Howards End echoed the review of the critic for The Daily Mail, who declared that “the faults of this book are as nothing compared to its merits. The way in which the characters … are made to live before us is of the essence of all great fiction… . Howards End is packed full of good things. It stands out head and shoulders above the great mass of fiction now claiming a hearing. The autumn season has brought us some good novels, but this is, so far, the best of them” (Gardner, pp. 144-145).
—Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Cannadine, David. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Cecil, Robert. Life in Edwardian England. London: B. T. Batsford, 1969.
Crow, Duncan. The Edwardian Woman. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
Duckworth, Alistair M. Howards End: E. M. Forster’s House of Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1989.
Forster, E. M. Howards End. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Gardner, Philip, ed. E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
McDowell, Frederick P. W. E. M. Forster. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Pearsall, Ronald. Edwardian Life and Leisure. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox-Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England. New York: Touchstone, 1993.
Priestley, J. B. The Edwardians. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Summers, Claude J. E. M. Forster. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.
Widdowson, Peter. E. M. Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History. London: Sussex University Press, 1977.