Reading Order
Howards End Reading Order
Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster is the great Edwardian novel about England's social future — 'Only connect!' is its famous epigraph, and the novel dramatizes the consequences of that aspiration across three families: the Schlegels (cultured, liberal, idealistic), the Wilcoxes (practical, commercial, imperialist), and the Basts (working-class, aspiring, precarious). Forster asked which class, which values, which way of living would inherit England — and gave a deliberately ambiguous answer: Helen Schlegel's illegitimate child by Leonard Bast inherits Howards End, but under the ownership and guardianship of Henry Wilcox. Howards End is both a social novel (about class, money, and power in Edwardian England) and a novel of ideas (about the relationship between the 'inner life' and the 'telegrams and anger' of practical life) — and it remains Forster's most fully realized attempt to answer the question that all his fiction poses: whether human connection across social division is possible, and what it costs.
Where to start
Howards End (1910) — the complete novel. The natural companion is A Passage to India (1924), Forster's final and darkest answer to the same question asked in a colonial context. A Room with a View (1908) is the most accessible Forster entry point; Howards End is more ambitious and more complex. The 1992 Merchant Ivory film with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins is excellent
Complete Howards End Book List
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Howards End
E.M. Forster·1910
Howards End — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Howards End by E.M. Forster about?
Howards End follows three Edwardian families across several years: the Schlegels (Margaret and Helen, half-German sisters with independent incomes and cultural values), the Wilcoxes (Henry, a businessman, and his family, practical and commercial), and the Basts (Leonard and his common-law wife Jacky, working-class and aspiring toward culture). The plot is set in motion by Mrs. Wilcox's friendship with Margaret Schlegel, her death, and her apparently expressed wish (in an uncertified note that the Wilcoxes destroy) that Margaret should inherit Howards End — the Wilcox country house. As the novel proceeds, Margaret marries Henry Wilcox; Helen's impulsive sympathy for Leonard Bast ends in scandal (she becomes pregnant by him); Leonard is killed by Charles Wilcox; Henry is imprisoned; and Margaret inherits Howards End with Helen and her baby. The famous epigraph 'Only connect!' refers to Forster's central argument: that the connection between the 'prose' of practical Wilcox life and the 'passion' of Schlegel inner life is what English civilization needs, but is almost impossible to achieve given the class structure and the social inequalities that separate people.
What does 'Only connect' mean in Howards End?
'Only connect' is the epigraph of Howards End and refers to the novel's central aspiration: that human beings should connect the practical and the emotional aspects of their natures (within themselves) and connect across the social, class, and temperamental barriers that divide them (between themselves and others). Margaret Schlegel represents the aspiration to connect: she marries Henry Wilcox in the hope that she can help him develop the inner life he has suppressed through the demands of business, and that she can learn from his practical competence. The novel's ending is deliberately ambiguous about whether this connection is achieved: Margaret does connect with Henry in some ways (he yields to her in the final crisis), but Leonard Bast is dead, Helen's child is born illegitimate, and the connection across class that might have saved Leonard was not made in time. Forster was skeptical about the social conditions that make genuine connection possible, and Howards End is his most sustained and complex exploration of those conditions.
How does Howards End compare to A Passage to India?
Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) are Forster's two major novels and are best read as companion studies in the same central question — whether genuine human connection is possible across social division — asked in different contexts and with different answers. In Howards End, the division is class and cultural temperament within England; in A Passage to India, the division is the colonial relationship between English and Indian. Howards End's answer is equivocal but not entirely pessimistic: connection of a sort is achieved, even if at enormous cost. A Passage to India's answer is darker: the colonial relationship makes genuine connection impossible, at least for now (Forster's 'not yet, not there'). Howards End is the more domestic and socially realistic; A Passage to India is more formally ambitious and more philosophically resigned. Both are essential Forster, and reading them in order (Howards End first) shows how his sense of what connection can achieve darkened across the fourteen years between them.
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