Howards End:

Howards End plots the universal friction between the inner and outer lives. Margaret Schlegel and her sister Helen are clearly of the ilk whose lives are governed by the inner life of emotion and human connection. After a chance meeting on a holiday, Helen is invited to the country home of the Wilcox family, ruled by Henry Wilcox, a man of the world, of industry, and not a man who allows the heart, either his own or his families', to enter into the calculations of life. The country home, Howards End, turns out to be a concern more of his wife's than his own and the place enchants Helen and then Margaret through Helen's description. The two families collide over time, Margaret befriending Mrs. Wilcox and then Henry, until the Margaret and Henry reach the acme of their differences, posing a difficult choice. Both must choose how to conduct the remainder of their lives, either coldly plodding along, adrift from their senses and their spirits, or pursuing life in more abandon, directed by the soul rather than the intellect.

Forster is a master of the subtlety of human character, creating two families, driven by similar perspectives but able to advance or retreat by degrees in their choices and lives such that they are all interesting and believable and captivating. Margaret and Helen, and their brother Tibby, are all molded in the feelings of life, the emotions and the senses, but all three move through different paths and make distinct choices, all which lead to Forster's ultimate confrontation and resolution. Similarly, the Wilcox family are all built of the substance of the world, cast of stone and concrete, but all stand at different levels in the skyline of the story. Forster's construct fo these two opposing forces, battling over the soul of the story, Howards End itself, directs the reader to the inner battle of the soul, the battle between flesh and spirit.

This was a perfect story; never rushed, always complex, and constantly provoking introspection. Forster's eye for the divisions of human labor and society is unique. But in the end, his understanding of balance in life, the give and take, contibutes more to the resolution of these divisions than any utopian ideal. ( )