Book Summary and Reviews of Howards End by E. M. Forster

Book Summary

From: Why We Should Read, by S. P. B. Mais, (1921)We read Howard's End for its unexpectedness, its elliptic talk, which so exactly hits off the characters he creates, for its manifestation of the Comic Spirit....

We read Howard's End for the merciless skill which E. M. Forster shows in laying bare the soul of Leonard Bast, the clerk in the insurance office, who reads Ruskin and goes to the Queen's Hall in order to improve himself, who is dragged into the gutter by his loose-living mistress ("she seemed all strings and bell-pulls, ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that chinked and caught—").... We read Howard's End for the equally merciless sketch of the millionaire husband of the heroine ("a man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognise them, because you cannot connect. I've had enough of your unweeded kindness. I've spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled.... No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled").If we demand of modern novels that they should portray human character exactly as it is and that the author should have a definite standpoint for his philosopher of life, one need quote no further to prove that in Howard's End these two desirable factors are to be found in profusion. Mr E. M. Forster is a conscious artist of a very high order and our only quarrel with him is that he writes too little.