In what was to prove the end of an idyllic period for the leisured English middle classes just before the outbreak of World War One, E. M. Forster captures the tensions and lack of “meeting of minds” between two middle class families with very different roots and attitudes: the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. The intellectual Schlegels get away with appearing a bit unorthodox since they are half-German, that is “foreigners”. They are idealistic within their cocoon of privilege, living comfortably on inherited money. The much wealthier, pragmatic, materialistic Wilcoxes have built a fortune “in trade” and have no compunction about “keeping the workers in their place”. As Henry Wilcox observes,
“You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years…the hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom”.

Through a fateful meeting of the Schlegel siblings with the bookish, music-loving clerk Leonard Bast, Forster portrays the rigid class divide of the early 1900s. Too poor even to afford a decent umbrella, too decent to abandon the ageing, former prostitute lover who has latched on to him, unable to regain a foothold on the ladder of respectability when he loses his job through no fault of his own, it proves too hard for him to win acceptance and pursue his interests.

Howards End seems an unlikely place for the Wilcoxes to live, being a somewhat unfashionable place in the depths of the countryside, based on Forster’s own childhood home, “Rooks Nest House”. It turns out that this belongs to Mrs Wilcox, a rather unsatisfactorily vague, two-dimensional character, dismissed as “uninteresting” by Margaret Schlegel’s chatterati friends. She exerts a calming influence on her family, but is not the woman one would expect Mr. Wilcox to have chosen for a wife. It seems that she is the “guardian” of a house which is the almost mystical symbol of an idealised way of English life that is fast disappearing at the turn of the C19 century. Knowing that she is terminally ill, she appears to hold, but never clearly expresses, the belief that Margaret Schlegel is more suited to own the house than the soulless, capitalist family into which Mrs Wilcox has married. The implications of her decision form an important part of the plot.

It may be surprising that, when widowed, the patriarch Mr. Wilcox falls for Margaret, the plain, serious-minded elder sister who has devoted herself to her orphaned siblings to the point of risking becoming an old maid. It is understandable that she seeks “a real man” in the form of Mr Wilcox, even though the two are clearly fundamentally different in their attitude to life.

The main characters, at least on the “middle class” side, are well developed. Margaret’s younger sister Helen, impetuous with a hint of instability, plays the role of the character prepared to challenge the system, but ill-equipped to cope unaided when “it comes to the crunch”. Brother Tibby provides a further contrast as the hypochondriac, wimpish bookworm cosseted by his sisters, who do not seem to resent the fact that, being the male child, he is the one to go Oxford.

Written at the end of a prolonged period of social stability and convention, but foreshadowing some dramatic changes, this stands out as one of the first “modern” novels, quite radical and original in certain respects. The story proceeds with some unexpectedly humorous moments and a sense of real connection between the characters in the form of conversations to which one can relate. Forster focuses on the relevant scenes, confidently omitting any superfluous “linking” chapters. Perhaps he can be forgiven for drifting occasionally into overblown Victorian-style philosophising.

This is an engaging family drama, with some profound insights which repay rereading. It can be read at two levels: either an Edwardian soap opera, or a quite complex amalgam of Forster’s deep reflections on the nature and future of English society, the differences between people and the ultimate need for tolerance. Although the characters may be a little wiser at the end, the wry truth remains that in any crisis the poor and the underdogs will tend to be the ones who lose out, but hints of the approaching war suggest that the escapist paradise of Howard’s End may not last.