Howards End, by E. M. Forster

Howards End is the story of two families: The wealthy German-English Schlegel family and the very wealthy and very English Wilcox family. The Schlegels are led by Margaret, our heroine, a young woman who has taken the place of her deceased parents in taking care of her sister, Helen, and their younger brother, called Tibby, who is a teen-ager at the beginning of the novel. There’s also an Aunt Juley Munt and a cousin named Frieda Mosebach. The Wilcox family consists of an older couple: Henry and Ruth, and their adult children, Charles, Paul, and Evie. “Howards End” is the name of the Wilcox country home, outside London, named for a previous owner related to Mrs. Wilcox. She romanticizes her home. The rest of the family is not so charmed.

The novel is set in the first decade of the 20th century. Automobiles are being introduced. Woman are campaigning for the right to vote. The rural, country nature of England is giving way to a cosmopolitan life-style dominated by business, and imperialism. Henry Wilcox represents the practical, impersonal, business-oriented, capitalist side. The other side, represented by Helen Schlegel represents the romantic, the humanitarian, and the love of nature. Margaret, though she comes from the Schlegel side of the binary comes to represent the bridging of the divide. Forster’s famous commandment, “Only connect” comes from Margaret, and refers to her vision of connecting these two outlooks. Here she speaks of how she plans to help Henry grow his soul:

“It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” (pp. 186-187. I read a library copy published in 1984 by Buccaneer Books, New York).

Before the novel begins, the Schlegel sisters had met Henry and Ruth Wilcox on a vacation in Germany. At the beginning of the novel the Wilcoxes have invited the Schlegels to Howards End (no apostrophe, this isn’t a novel about the backside of a man named Howard!). Only Helen makes the trip because Margaret is suddenly required to stay home and take care of Tibby who has taken ill. At Howards End, Helen falls foolishly in love with Paul. They briefly announce an engagement but by the time Aunt Juley arrives to sort things out, they’ve already called it off. Paul will soon leave for Nigeria and is absent for most of the novel, but the other Wilcoxes are left with a view of Helen and the Schlegels as romantic and undisciplined.

The scene switches back to London, where the Schlegels live at Wickham Place. There’s a wonderful chapter that takes place at a concert, where the characters describe the music and their thoughts about it (Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Brahms, and Elgar) and we’re introduced to a new important character, Leonard Bast, who happens to be seated next to Margaret. Helen leaves the concert before the Elgar and mistakenly takes Leonard’s umbrella. Margaret gives Leonard her card so he can come by the house and pick it up later.

Meanwhile, the Wilcoxes have taken a flat in London to assist their son Charles in arranging his wedding to a woman named Dolly. The flat happens to be near the Schlegels. Margaret and Ruth strike up a friendship. They seem to understand each other. Margaret shares that the longterm lease on Wickham Place, her childhood home, will end in a few years and the landlord means to tear the house down to build a new development. The women bond over the love of a special house. They go Christmas shopping together. Their friendship deepens.

And then Ruth unexpectedly dies. She had been ill but keeping it a secret. Even more unexpectedly, Ruth had written a note from the nursing home, delivered to her family after her death, dictating that she wanted to give Howards End to Margaret. Henry and the children discuss the note and decide to ignore it, but they guess that Margaret might have been manipulating Ruth Wilcox and are suspicious of her.

Here there’s a gap of two years. Now Tibby has gone to Oxford. The Schlegels and Wilcoxes meet occasionally. Leonard Bast turns up again, but first his wife, Jacky. Jacky shows up at Wickham Place looking for her husband who she hasn’t seen in a few days, with Margaret’s card in her hand, which she found tucked in one of Leonard’s books. The Schlegel sisters are mystified. Then Leonard appears the next day and straightens things out. He reminds the sisters of the time they met before and further charms them with the story of why he had been away from home for a few days; he had been walking all evening in the country, following a whim to get away on an adventure. Leonard beguiles the sisters’ romantic natures, and as they have money and he does not, they determine to help him. There’s a chapter where the sisters attend a ladies luncheon party and debate just how the rich should be able to best help the poor.

Later, at a restaurant, the sisters are discussing Leonard Bast when Henry Wilcox overhears them and comes over. He doesn’t care much about helping the poor but shares the inside information that the company where Leonard clerks is about to go bankrupt and Leonard should get out. The sisters decide to invite Leonard to tea and warn him. He comes and gets the news, but he’s also offended by the sisters’ attention and charity. Forster gives both the rich Henry Wilcox and the poor Leonard Bast the line that there will be rich and poor always and don’t see the point of meddling with it.

Next, Evie Wilcox invites Margaret to dinner, ostensibly for Margaret to meet Evie’s fiancé, but actually, as it turns out, to dine with Henry Wilcox who has taken a romantic interest in the younger woman. Shortly after, Henry proposes to Margaret, improbably, but such is the necessity of plot. Margaret says yes, and it is here that she makes her “Only connect!” speech about how she plans to save Henry’s soul through connecting the poetic and the prosaic sides of life.

It turns out Leonard Bast did leave his company following Henry’s advice relayed through the Schlegels. He took a lower paying job in a bank, but then, even worse, the bank needed to downsize and Leonard lost that job. He and his wife are destitute, living on handouts from his estranged family. Henry shrugs at the situation. The sisters feel responsible and double their resolve to help.

Evie and her man have their wedding at another of the Wilcox’s country homes, this one called Oniton. Margaret attends the wedding. At the end of the day Helen shows up with Leonard and Jacky, having impulsively brought them up by train to confront Henry and make things right. In the second big plot contrivance it turns out Henry knows Jacky. They recognize each other. Ten years earlier, while married to Ruth, Henry had an affair with Jacky when he was apart from Ruth working in Cyprus. The truth comes out all around. Margaret sends Helen and the Bast’s away thinking at least temporarily that the situation has become impossible for her and Henry to provide any help. Helen tries to give some of her own fortune to Leonard but he refuses. Helen then disappears to Germany and her erratic behavior and lack of communication begin to worry Margaret and Tibby.

Margaret forgives Henry his past indiscretion (really an offense against Ruth) and they marry quietly. Then there’s the question of where to live. None of the Wilcox’s current homes seem suitable to Henry and they plan to build something new. With the Wickham Place lease now gone, the Schlegels store their furniture temporarily at Howards End setting up the last act of the drama.

Eight month’s later, Aunt Juley takes ill, bringing Helen, at last, back from Germany, but she’s reluctant to meet the family, stays in London, and plans to return to Germany as soon as possible. Aunt Juley pulls through so that opportunity to meet Helen is gone, but Helen wants a few books that belong to her, and thus Margaret is able to arrange for Helen to go to Howards End where all the family belongings are stored and where Margaret secretly plans to confront her.

Henry and Margaret go down, staying at Charles’ nearby home. From there, they caravan down to Howards End and find Helen. The mystery is resolved. She isn’t crazy; she’s pregnant. Margaret manages to send all the others away and be alone with Helen. The sisters reconcile. Helen asks that she and Margaret spend the night together in the house (a busybody servant has unpacked all the Schlegels’ things and set the furniture in the rooms). Margaret goes back to Henry to ask permission; it’s his house. He says, “No” but Margaret defies him and stays overnight with Helen at Howards End. In the morning, Charles comes to the house to throw them out and finds Leonard Bast. Leonard, in desperation, had been seeking Margaret, first in London and then, being told by a maid, at Howards End. When he arrives at the house he hears voices discussing his own name. Charles had just gotten it out of Helen that Leonard is the father. Then Leonard is seen. Charles is enraged. He grabs a sword from the wall and hits Leonard with it. Leonard clutches at a pile of books for support and they fall on him. They carry him outside for air and ask for water, but Leonard is dead.

Charles is tried for manslaughter and is sentenced to three years. This news breaks Henry, and seeing his brokenness, Margaret forgives him and moves him and herself into Howards End. The final chapter takes place fourteen months later. Margaret and Henry are still at Howards End; it seems to be permanent now. Helen is living with them. Her baby plays in the field with a neighbor farmer’s young son. In the final scene Henry has called together his children to be clear about how he has settled financial arrangements between them and his wife. Dolly represents Charles who is still in prison. Margaret is to be given Howards End when he dies, and she plans to leave it to her nephew, Helen’s baby. The children all consent and say goodbye. Dolly remarks, “Good-bye, Mr. Wilcox. It does seem curious that Mrs. Wilcox would have left Margaret Howards End, and yet she get it, after all.” So Margaret learns the truth but makes no fuss. She forgives Henry and there’s a happy end.

The plot is lively and satisfyingly complicated. That it’s improbable in a few places makes no matter. Forster adds observations on human nature and the questions of economic class, morality, women’s rights, and speculations about the growing cosmopolitan future, which are insightful, but never preachy or distracting from the story. There’s a light touch throughout; he smiles at his characters and loves them. The narrator intrudes in a couple of places. Like James in The Portrait of a Lady, Forster writes as though he were a journalist researching documents and telling a true story rather than making it all up. For instance, speaking of Ruth Wilcox:

“Perhaps it was she who had desired the Miss Schelgels to be invited to Howards End, and Margaret whose presence she had particularly desired. All this is speculation: Mrs. Wilcox has left few clear indications behind her.” (p. 64)

Or, again, as the Wilcox family concludes their discussion about whether they should follow Ruth Wilcox’s dying instructions about Howards End, rather than record the end of the conversation, Forster writes:

“It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary to the dead woman’s intentions in the past, contrary to her very nature, so far as that nature was understood by them. To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir.” (p. 98)

I have read Forster before, A Room With a View, A Passage to India, and Maurice, published after his death, in 1970. I would have sworn I’d read Howards End before, too, but I’m sure now I hadn’t. I have been reading several mid-century English novels lately starting with Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and re-reading Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. I wanted to read Howards End particularly because there’s a play coming to Los Angeles next year, The Inheritance, that is somehow inspired by Howards End and Forster even appears as a character, I’m told. I can’t imagine how a play about generations of gay men in the post-AIDS era can be derived from the Schlegels and Wilcoxes but at least now I’m prepared.

I enjoyed it immensely.