Howards End

By far my most personal Forster. I felt written about. I was in terror through the second half of the story at what he was doing. But he was doing pretty truly, and he came through at the end with optimism not punishment.

This is amazing writing about women. To have a women’s friendship told so well and be the motor of the plot – in the first half, and one might argue in the whole.

I hovered between the sisters in what I thought about events and whose philosophy to live by at a given moment. They are not two types like the Sense and Sensibility sisters, but are nicely contrasted and close/conflicting.

Then, Mrs Wilcox (the first). Miss Avery.

Sisterhood wins in this one. There’s a moment of women’s rebellion and comradeship as show more exciting as Thelma and Louise, although in an English garden against stuffy gentlemen. It has the escapist clause of Maurice, arguably more rationally stated (hey, I don’t need rationality. But Forster does).

This is so much about ‘the sexes’; and written in 1910. It’s a wonder it is so recognisable. At the price of being cruel to its men, except for one. Unless you can stomach Mr Wilcox better than I can – I’m with sister Helen, not sister Meg, there.

It talks of Imperialists a lot, in at least a faintly critical spirit; there is a running argument about the English Imperialist. Meanwhile, I don’t quite know what Forster understood by ‘cosmopolitan’ at this point in time, but it isn’t good.

His style is strange. This time I liked it, complete with philosophising and foreshadowing; I thought he almost never put a foot wrong, although his moves are his own. It has a slight non-realist symbolism of structure, which I enjoy (the disapproving call this too much coincidence).

I thought it a near-perfect novel. show less

This time the conflict Forster establishes is between the liberal, intellectual, culture-loving and half-German Schlegels and their antithesis, the coarse, practical, capitalist and very British Wilcoxes. It’s not the one-sided fight you might imagine, because the Wilcoxes have a trump card in middle-aged wood-nymph Ruth Wilcox and her bond to her family’s old farmhouse in Hertfordshire, Howards End, whilst Margaret Schlegel, at least, is well-aware that her family, for all its devotion to advanced political ideas, never actually gets anything done, and that she and her siblings are allowed to spend their time enjoying beautiful things and arguing about the shape the revolution will take thanks to the money that their Wilcox-like show more grandparents earned transferring goods between ships and warehouses in the port of Stettin. So it isn’t quite as strange in the book as it was in the film that Margaret feels herself oddly drawn to Henry Wilcox.

Caught in the middle of the struggle are the unfortunate but aspirational clerk Leonard Bast and his wife Jacky. The Schlegels try to intervene to improve Len’s chances in life, but in their ignorance and incompetence only succeed in smashing his fragile existence to bits. The depiction of the Basts is a clear case of the young Forster getting out of his social depth — Jacky is a mere hateful caricature, whilst poor Leonard is so obviously there not as a person in his own right but as a cause for the Schlegels to fail at, right through to his ludicrous end. That makes the novel harder to take for a modern reader, who wants Len to be a sympathetic, tragic character, but perhaps the readers Forster was writing for knew as little about the lives of ordinary people as he did at the time. (Ironically, Forster’s closest friends in the last years of his life were Bob and May Buckingham, a couple from a very similar social class to the Basts. No doubt he was mortified by the way he had written about Len and Jacky…) show less

Howards End is one of my favorite books, and every couple of years I pull it down off the shelf to reacquaint myself with it. It's one of those books that has become an old friend over the years.

The story revolves around the Schlegels, Wilcoxes and Basts, three families whose lives interconnect over the course of several years and not necessarily always for the better, and at the center of the story is always the country home, Howards End. The book is an amazing study of class distinctions; passion versus intellect; constraint versus action; wealth versus poverty.

The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, are passionate for life; they want to experience as much as they can from it. The Wilcoxes come from a more conservative stock, more show more it tune with their wealth and possessions than anything else. After a hastily announced (as just as hastily broken) engagement between the youngest Wilcox son, Paul, and Helen, the families find themselves at odds, until an unlikely friendship forms between Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel. Upon Mrs. Wilcox's death, she leaves Howards End to Margaret, but the Wilcoxes as a whole do not feel that Mrs. Wilcox was in her right frame of mind and never let Margaret know of Mrs. Wilcox's bequest. In amidst these settings we are also introduced to Leonard Bast, who lives on the brink of poverty and feels that through education and enlightenment he might better his life and that of his fiancée, Jacky.

There are so many subtle nuances to this story, I have a hard time getting it all down on paper. Forster has created an amazing story that is poignant in its telling and staggering in it depth. No matter how many times I read Howards End, I am always amazed at the intricacies of the story and feel that I take something new away with each reading. show less

Howards End is a study in early 20th century social class, gender, and overall world view as exemplified by the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family in particular its patriarch, Henry. Having met one another by chance on holiday, the novel opens with the younger, more impetuous Helen committing a faux pas by assuming a romantic relationship with Henry’s younger son, Paul. But when the Wilcox family moves into a flat near the sisters, Margaret befriends Henry’s wife Ruth. When Ruth dies unexpectedly, she leaves written instructions that their country home, Howards End, be left to Margaret. But the family quickly talks themselves out of this and Margaret is none the wiser.

Meanwhile, Helen and Margaret become show more acquainted with Leonard Bast, a young man working in London’s financial sector. The Schlegels occupy a position on the social ladder between Bast and Wilcox, and in their idealism try to use their acquaintance with Henry Wilcox to improve Leonard’s circumstances.

The relationships between the families and between Helen and Margaret continue to evolve throughout this novel, in ways both surprising and melancholy. Henry is both likeable and insufferable, clearly in thrall to capitalism. Margaret and Helen are artistic and prefer ideas to facts, but despite this shared world view their relationship is somewhat fragile. And their hopes for poor Leonard Bast and his wife Jacky cannot be achieved in the face of others’ long-held views. It’s a poignant story with lessons we as a society still have yet to learn. show less

Two sisters encounter another English family while on holidays in Germany and develop ties that carry on through the novel. Howards End is the name of the family's estate north of London based on the author's beloved childhood home, and it plays a symbolic role in the story that creeps up on you. There's a thematic parallel here with "Passage", the communication challenge in this case being between and across social strata within a single culture. Both novels propose bridges built from compassion, from assuming there are commonalities to be found versus doggedly insisting upon an "us" and "them" dichotomy. To achieve it we must lay ourselves emotionally open, sensitive to our own hearts first before we can presume to understand the show more hearts of others.

I found the opening very engaging, didn't care for some plot turns in the middle but was deeply held by its ending. Events are interspersed with impressive psychological insight in the quieter passages. I wasn't always on point with following the symbolism and nuances of the activities, just as I wasn't entirely free of wanting something eventful to happen during the interludes, but then I was rewarded for reflection or patience respectively. This fault lies with me rather than the novel, and I think a second read would go much more smoothly. E.M. Forster is a classic "writer's writer" who knows how to turn a metaphor to his advantage or recall an earlier passage at precisely the correct time. show less

Rating 3.5 stars. Where to start? Well, this may be a bit strange, but my initial reaction after the first few pages was: “oh, this is not for me”, and that was provoked by the extremely reserved, decent-bourgeois environment that Forster evokes from the beginning, with the infamous English ‘wit’ applied in the superlative. A bit too much Downtown Abbey, you can say. But it soon became clear to me that Forster brings a much more layered story, and ingeniously interweaves all kinds of themes and issues.

That is indeed in my eyes the exceptional strength of this novel: Forster tells a seemingly quite simple story (you can summarize it in one sentence: the very lively and sensitive Margaret Schlegel, of German descent, marries a show more thoroughly English, calculating, bourgeois businessman, Henry Wilcox, and is forced by a crisis surrounding her younger sister to stand up for herself ànd justice, and thus – unconsciously – righting a great injustice that has been done to her). But this story is woven with an extreme amount of contrasts: the naïve-sincere liveliness of the Schlegel sisters versus the calculating underhandedness of the Wilcoxes, the wealthy middle class versus the poor, purity versus hypocrisy, brutal modernity versus rural conviviality, English versus German, woman versus man, and so on. There’s also a markedly anti-imperialistic element in Forster’s writing. And all these contrasts intertwine in such a dynamic way that you become completely captivated by the plot of the story.

As said, Forster tells this story with so much irony and especially ‘wit’ that it sometimes becomes pure satire, although the cynical undertone gradually becomes stronger. Only the many passages in which the author adds general wisdom to concrete situations and persons (in the style of Henry James) were less to my liking. But the perspective of the main character Margaret Schlegel is portrayed so brilliant and heartfelt that it makes up for a lot. It even reconciles one with the somewhat sugary happy ending. show less

This novel is beautifully written and, for a book written before World War I, surprisingly relevant to today's political and social climate. The central conflict seems to be between Margaret's ideals and how these manifest in real life. She is intellectual, well-educated, and has a strong will, which makes it disappointing to see her make choices that seem counter to these aspects of herself. I felt so irritated with her for some of the mistakes I saw her making, but in the end, she seems to come to a place of compromise that is better for (nearly) everyone involved than what would have been available had she dug in her heels from the beginning.

The novel seemed to be gearing up for a grand confrontation and dramatic decisions, and so show more at first this compromise ending was unsatisfying to me. But upon reflection, I decided that the ending is all the more realistic for the lack of fireworks. Gradually I saw that the decisions Margaret made that were so frustrating to me were frustrating because they're the kinds of decisions I think anyone makes who has ideals and also lives in the world. It's more satisfying to read about people bucking convention, throwing off everything they once valued and making a clean breast of it as a shiny, new person, but it's not realistic. We can make external changes, but we don't really become new people, or if we do, it's a slow metamorphosis, and one we can't govern ourselves, contrary to the promises of self-help books, talk shows, and websites selling fitness programs.

Compromise doesn't give the dopamine release that I crave, and it doesn't feed the desire I still feel despite my constant efforts to the contrary to see punished people I think have done wrong, but it provides a much more loving and sustainable model for change than the dramatic ending. Only connect.

Some quotes that spoke to me:

p.25: "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."

p. 52: "I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves."

p.91: "Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have moved mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken...Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."

p. 128: "The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians in the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret to their imaginative poverty."

p.132: "I don't believe in suiting my conversation to my company. One can doubtless hit upon some medium of exchange that seems to do well enough, but it's no more like the real thing than money is like food. There's no nourishment in it." show less