Recommendations
Books Like Howards End
Literary Novels of Class and Connection Like Howards End
E.M. Forster's Howards End — 'Only connect' — is the great Edwardian novel of class collision and missed connection. These 8 novels share its intelligence about the English class system, its elegiac sense of an older England being lost, and its belief that genuine connection across social distance is both necessary and almost impossibly difficult.
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A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
Aziz and Fielding, the Marabar Caves, the trial — Forster's final and most celebrated novel extends the 'Only connect' argument of Howards End to the colonial encounter, where the cultural distance is even greater and the consequences of failed connection are more catastrophic; the obvious companion for Howards End readers who want Forster at his most ambitious
- 2Buy
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, the perfect English butler, driving across England and slowly understanding what he sacrificed — Ishiguro's Booker Prize winner shares Howards End's elegiac relationship to an England that is passing away, its meditation on the English capacity for emotional repression, and its sense that the values (dignity, service, restraint) that shaped a way of life were also its tragedy
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North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Margaret Hale's collision with the industrial north and the mill owner Thornton — Gaskell's Victorian novel shares Howards End's structure of a woman from the cultivated south confronting the commercial north and learning to revise her judgments; the Victorian ancestor of the 'Only connect' problem; where Forster is elegiac, Gaskell is hopeful
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The social life of a Midlands town in the 1830s, told through Dorothea Brooke's idealism and Lydgate's ambitions — Eliot's masterpiece shares Howards End's interest in the gap between what people aspire to and what the social order permits, and its sense that meaningful life is possible even when the grand plan fails
- 5Buy
Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa Dalloway preparing for a party, Septimus Warren Smith in the park — Woolf's 1925 novel shares Howards End's Edwardian-into-Modern English setting, its sense of social performance as both meaningful and suffocating, and its interest in the interior lives of people whom the external social world does not permit to connect
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The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Nick Guest living with a Conservative MP's family in 1980s London — Hollinghurst's Booker Prize winner is the most direct contemporary descendant of Howards End: a young man of aesthetic sensibility inserted into a world of commercial and political power, watching from the inside as the social order that includes him also excludes him; the English class novel translated into the Thatcher era
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A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
Lucy Honeychurch liberated from conventional Edwardian expectation by her time in Florence — Forster's lighter novel shares Howards End's preoccupation with the English capacity for emotional repression and its belief that connection is possible if one can escape the social conventions that prevent it; the obvious introduction to Forster for readers who want something less demanding than Howards End
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On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Two university professors at war over scholarship and ideology, and the families they drag into the conflict — Smith's novel is a conscious rewriting of Howards End (the two professors are the Schlegel/Wilcox split in academic form), using Forster's structure and its meditation on culture and connection in a contemporary American-English context; the most direct homage to Howards End in contemporary fiction
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