Howards End
by E. M. Forster
Summary
Forster circles three families around the fate of a country house called Howards End: the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters Margaret and Helen, the wealthy and pragmatic Wilcoxes, and Leonard Bast, a struggling insurance clerk the Schlegels take a well meaning but disruptive interest in. Helen's brief affair with Leonard, conducted partly out of guilt after the Wilcoxes' careless financial advice costs him his job, sets the novel's climax in motion; when Leonard's estranged wife Jacky reveals a past connection to Henry Wilcox himself, Henry's son Charles attacks Leonard in a rage and beats him with the flat of a sword, and Leonard dies when a bookcase collapses on him, a death the court calls manslaughter. Margaret, who has by then married the widowed Henry Wilcox despite the gulf between her values and his family's, ends the novel installed at Howards End itself with Helen and Helen's infant son by Leonard, and the closing pages reveal that Henry's first wife, Ruth Wilcox, had secretly willed the house to Margaret years earlier, a wish the family had suppressed, so its return to Margaret's circle by the novel's end restores a kind of buried justice.
Forster uses the house as a working symbol for the question that drives the whole novel: who actually deserves to inherit England, its comfortable, capable Wilcoxes or its thoughtful, connected Schlegels. It reads with real intelligence and control, moving between drawing room comedy and genuine tragedy without losing its balance, and the famous epigraph, only connect, sits over the whole book as both its argument and its ache; the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes never fully manage it, however hard Margaret tries.
Forster based Howards End itself on Rooks Nest House in Hertfordshire, where he lived as a boy from 1883 to 1893 and which had previously belonged to a real family named Howard.
Historical Context & Significance
No British fiction prize of consequence existed in 1910, decades before the Booker Prize began in 1969, so Forster's novel had nothing to compete for. Edward Arnold published it in London on October 18, 1910, and the Manchester Guardian praised it that year as a novel of high quality written with what it called a feminine brilliance.
Forster's later novel A Passage to India won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1924, but Howards End itself received no award, and it is now widely treated as his most fully realized novel, ranked 38th on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the century's best English language novels. Merchant Ivory's 1992 film adaptation won three Oscars, including Emma Thompson's for Best Actress, and a 2017 BBC and Starz miniseries followed; Zadie Smith's 2005 novel On Beauty reworked its central situation for a very different setting.