In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Howards End 38th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
A Manchester Guardian review written in the year of novel’s publication praised it as “a novel of high quality written with what appears to be a feminine brilliance of perception.”[3]
Critics have described Howards End as a “Condition-of-England novel” for its depiction of the poverty and precarity of the Bast family as well as the rapid changes in the social and economic structure of England in the Edwardian period.[4] The Wilcox family represent “new money” as well as global capitalism with their ownership of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company, while the German Schlegel sisters represent the educated, cosmopolitan “New Woman” and raise questions of women’s suffrage. The Wilcoxes were possibly inspired by the harsh landlords of Forster’s childhood home,[5] while the Schlegels were loosely based on Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, who were Forster’s contemporaries in the liberal and humanist-minded Bloomsbury Group.[6]
The house of the title, Howards End, “is a mystical symbol of the beauty and gentility of that fast-disappearing world. The question of who will own it – for which read England’s social future – dominates the book.”[7] It sits in the countryside, away from London, holding immense sentimental value to Mrs Ruth Wilcox, who threatens the male line of inheritance when she attempts to leave the house to newly-befriended Margaret Schlegel upon her death. The core message of the novel is its epigraph, “Only connect”, a similar theme to that of Forster’s novel Maurice, which also features cross-class relationships. In the end, the three families are forced into a form of uneasy reconciliation; critic Barbara Morden argues:
“Ultimately, it is Leonard Bast, the uprooted and dispossessed peasant, who proves to be the key to the novel’s pattern of connection and theme of inheritance. It is his and Helen’s illegitimate baby, a child of nature rather than a 'Son of Empire', born at the heart of the old house into a newly constituted family, who will inherit Howards End, perhaps England.”[8]
Several critics have also assessed the influence of Forster’s closeted homosexuality on the novel. Critic Vivian Gornick argued that Forster’s lack of romantic or sexual experience at the time of writing “haunts” the book: “Unable to achieve emotional experience himself, yet impelled to write about it, he here adopts the intellectually intelligent voice of a writer who senses the import of what lies behind the tragedy of life but doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”[9]
