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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.Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.
Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
"Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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E. M. Forster was thirty-one when Howards End appeared on October 18, 1910. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Home, Sweet Home,
By
This review is from: Howards End (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
This is the first work of E. M. Forster that I've read and I look forward to reading more. "Howards End" is a not just a wonderfully told story, but also a sociological statement. Set in the first decade of the twentieth century, the story centres around three families: the Schlegel sisters (Margaret and Helen), the Wilcox family and the Basts. The Schlegels represent the established aristocracy, that class concerned with art and not so concerned with money since they always have enough. The Wilcox family represents the bourgeois class, the class that makes money and makes empires. The Basts are the working poor, who suffer at the hands of the upper classes even when those classes mean well. Finished just four years prior to the start of World War I, "Howards End" also reflects the growing tensions between England and Germany, the Schlegel sisters having had a German father.All in all, I really enjoyed this novel. It was very easy to get caught up in the characters and the plot and, at the same time, understand the underlying message of social and political tension that Forster must have felt in his time. Forster seems to have disliked certain aspects of the change that he saw in England, perhaps he was just a bit prescient. This passage from "Howards End" caught my eye: "London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before." Home is where the hearth is, but what if there is no hearth? But Howards End had a hearth and that home had history as well, perhaps the house, Howards End, and what it represented, was the real message that Forster wanted to leave with his readers. I highly recommend this novel.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A 4-star book but a 2-star paperback edition,
By lunacharskii (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Howards End (Paperback)
As fond as I am of this novel I cannot recommend this particular paperback Vintage edition. In a work so meticulous and richly crafted as _Howards End_, it's more than a little jarring to stumble across typos and spelling errors in the text. A handsome and attractive volume, such as we've all come to expect from Vintage, but those typos are really unforgivable. By all means read the book, but opt for a different edition.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly good, uniquely wise,
By
This review is from: Howards End (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)
I expected Jane Austen and got a very pleasant surprise. Forster uses his characters and their relationships and a launching pad for more philosophical and sociological ruminations. And not in a contrived way, but in the almost intuitive way our own interactions with the people we meet stimulate us, provoke us, and stretch us.And as far as I know, this book is one of a kind in that it treats people with no imagination with dignity and respect. Most of us are aware there is some kind of division in the world between artists and businessmen, and the division has shown up often enough in literature sure enough. But as all producers of fiction are by necessity on the artist side of the division, businessmen are usually the villains, evil at worst and stupid at best, and artists, are, quite naturally, the heroes. Forster is uniquely wise enough to peer into the enemy camp and see beauty and value. My feel is that Forster's characterization at times surpasses his writing ability. This is more praise than criticism; his vivid imagination is able to conjure and follow characters that his pen finds difficult to put on the page. They move and live and act in ways he is unable to fully explain or account for. And when was the last time you were able to truly capture all the complexities, intricacies and contradictions of a real person with the rudimentary elements of pen paper and alphabet? That Forster's characters defy characterization may be a contradiction, but in my book it is high praise. And the way Forster often philosophizes might annoy others, but I do enjoy it. There is a passage early in the book about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that is thinly costumed to make it fit within the frames of the book, I love it for what it is -- a brilliant exposition on a distinct piece of music. --... Some quotes I enjoyed: "It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it." (23) "What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?...Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you were one of these." (112) "England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have molded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?" (138) "The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursion into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility." (153) "Love and Truth-- their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air." (181) "But man is an odd, sad creature as yet, intent on pilfering the earth, and heedless of the growths within himself. He cannot be bored about psychology. He leaves it to the specialist, which is as if he should leave his dinner to be eaten by a steam-engine. He cannot be bothered to digest his own soul." (219) "She could not assess her trespass by any moral code; it was everything or nothing. Morality can tell us that murder is worse than stealing, and group most sins in an order all must approve, but it cannot group Helen. The surer its pronouncements on this point, the surer may we be that morality is not speaking. Christ was evasive when they questioned Him. It is those that cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone." (246)
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