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Customer Review: Will I ever get to the end of Howards End?
I love reading. There is nothing like the printed page. I also love a good movie. In this case, I must definitely say I'll take the movie over the book any day. I will say that I was exposed to the movie first but I don't believe that prejudiced me. I was wanting to view the movie again after not having seen it in a while (it had not been a long while, mind you, because it is one of my favorites) but decided, since I had the book in my library, I would read it first before viewing the movie again so as to discover any subleties that may enhance my enjoyment of the movie further. I had done that with A Room With a View (also by Forster) and it worked fine. I loved the book every bit as much as the movie. Alas, it was not to be the same with Howards End. I have been struggling for the last few weeks (I don't get much time for reading these days) to get through the book. Usually I don't want a book to end but in this case... well, the title of this review says it all. For details on why I feel that way, I refer you to any of the other 2 and 3 star reviews, as they express my sentiments exactly and make me feel better to know it wasn't just me (although I am fully aware that everyone has their own opinion). Suffice to say I will no longer torture myself with trying to get through the book. Instead I will kick back and enjoy, guilt-free, another viewing of a very fine movie. Kudos to Forster for having written the book which provided a story-line for Merchant/Ivory to make a very fine movie. Kudos to M/I for making a very fine movie from, as another reviewer so aptly put it, a "mediocre" book.
Customer Review: Homecomings.
Most of us connect the notion of "home" or "childhood home" with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox's world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend their vacations, and which, everyone assumes, will pass on to her children when she is dead.
But will it really? Unbeknownst to Ruth's family, the issue is put into question when Ruth forms a friendship with her neighbor-to-be Margaret Schlegel, like Ruth herself from a middle class background but nevertheless separated from Ruth's world by several layers of society and politics: That of the Wilcox is epitomized by pater familias/businessman Henry - rich, conservative and without any sympathy whatsoever for those less fortunate than themselves ("It's all part of the battle of life ... The poor are poor; one is sorry for them, but there it is," Henry Wilcox once comments); while the Schlegels, on the other hand, have just enough income to lead a comfortable life, were brought up by their Aunt Juley, support suffrage (women's right to vote) and surround themselves with actors, "blue-stockings" (feminists), intellectuals and other members of the avantgarde. Further complexity is added when Margaret's sister Helen brings to the Schlegel home Leonard Bast, a poor but idealistic young clerk who loves music, literature and astronomy - and with him, his working class wife Jacky, the embarrassment of having to interact with her, and the even more embarrassing revelation which she has in store for Henry Wilcox; eventually leaving her disillusioned husband to comment that "books aren't real," and that in fact they and music "are for the rich so they don't feel bad after dinner."
An allegory on the question who will ultimately inherit England - the likes of the Wilcox, the Schlegels, or the Basts - E.M. Forster's novel is one of the early 20th century's finest pieces of literature; a masterpiece of social study and character study alike, in which the author brings his protagonists and their environment to life with empathy and a fine eye for detail. The story's strongest character is undoubtedly Margaret Schlegel, a young woman "filled with ... a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encounter[s] in her path through life," as Forster describes her, and whose friendship with Ruth Wilcox, even at the beginning, already brings the two families back together again after Helen has endangered their as-yet tentaive acquaintance by engaging in a near-scandalous affair with Ruth's younger son Paul.
Ultimately, Margaret and Ruth become so close that Ruth eventually decides to give Meg "something worth [her] friendship" - none other than Howards End, a wish that has her panicking family scramble most ungentlemanly for every reason in the book to invalidate the codicil setting forth that bestowal, from its lacking date and signature to the testatrix's state of mind, the ambiguity of the writing's content, the question why Meg should want the house in the first place since she already has one, and the fact that the writing is only in pencil, which "never counts," as Dolly, wife of the Wilcox' elder son Charles is quick to point out, only to be reprimanded by her father in law "from out of his fortress" (Forster) not to "interfere with what you do not understand." And so it is that Meg will only see the house (and be instantly mistaken for Ruth because she has "her way of walking around the house," as the housekeeper explains) when she and her siblings have to look for a new home and Henry Wilcox, who has started to court her after Ruth's death, suggests that the Schlegel's furniture be temporarily stored there - a fateful decision. And while Meg and Henry slowly and painfully learn to adjust to each other, the complexity of their families' relations, and their interactions with the Basts, finally come crashing down on them in a dramatic conclusion.
Also recommended:
Great Novels and Short Stories of E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster: A Life (A Harvest Book)
Howards End - The Merchant Ivory Collection
A Room with a View (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Brideshead Revisited
The W. Somerset Maugham Reader: Novels, Stories, Travel Writing
Customer Review: Only connect
Who will inherit England? While Forster's Howard End does not exactly answer this question, it sets out the possibilities. This superbly crafted novel is quite relevant today: how do the actions of the individual citizens of the world's greatest superpower influence the destiny of that nation? For the turn of the century England of Howards End, it is about Empire and money and its corrosive influence on tradition and personal morality; and Forester sets up the house, Howards End, as the curious symbol of England in a transition from an uneasy present to an uncertain future. Characters from different social and economic strata subtly, cunningly, even sub-consciously, compete for ownership of the house. For Forester, Howards End, with its elm tree with pig teeth embedded in the trunk (used by peasants in a former age as a balm for tooth aches) becomes a new type of mythology for England. For a nation radically transformed, and set for yet more change, the house becomes a fixed point, a vestige of an agrarian past which may be set for a rebirth
Customer Review: Mediocre
Simply put, EMF is no Wilde, not even close. His characters are, in a sense, the stock sort of British characters one is well familiar with from PBS productions like Masterpiece Theater, or the Merchant Ivory films of the 1990s. In fact, this book was adapted into a well regarded film by that company back then. Yet, I could not shake free the notion that this solid book would have been infinitely better in the hands of a master like Wilde. There is none of the witty repartee, and none of the ferocious characterization. Yes, Wilde's plays were comedies, while this book is not really a comedy, but I kept thinking, it should be a comedy.
Howard's End is the name of a wealthy estate that entails the lives of two clans- the wealthy Wilcoxes and the plebeian Schlegels. There are all of the typical episodes of class envy and snobbery, a possible budding romance between a wealthy scion and a poor girl, and the like, but the meat of the tale kicks off when Margaret Schlegel and the matrician Mrs. Wilcox become buddies, with the old lady hobnobbing with young Margaret's pseudo-intellectual bohemian pals. The two women then holiday at Howard's End, the Wilcox estate, and bond more closely. Mrs. Wilcox then dies, but not before willing Margaret Howard's End after finding out Margaret's clan are about to lose their home....it's the look into Wildean heaven that most undoes EMF. Let me give you just a few samples of the difference. Here is a quote that seems to be quite Wildean:
`It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it.'
Note that there is no real hyperbole, the speaker is rather dour. There is a ruing, without a wink. Perhaps a better quote is this:
`What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?...Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you were one of these.'
Again, note the dourness and resignation. Wilde, were he expressing either of these sentiments, would have done so with more flair, uplift, and bite. These are not examples of bad prose, mind you. They are good- even very good, and that's the difference- Wilde and his characters are utterly brilliant!
A final quote:
`Love and Truth-- their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.'
I do believe Prospero, in Wilde's hands, would be far from reconciled. But, again, that may just be my lack of weaning from the Master. In short, the tale told is by no means unique, and its preachments rather bald, but it is solidly told, and in comparison to the dreck of recent years one may regard Howard's End as a classic. It's just in light of its contemporaries it shines less brightly.
In a sense, this sort of tale, when stripped down for a film or PBS production, works better, because it is shorn of its soap operatic worst elements of unimportant sub-stories, yet, damn it, without the Wildean wit, I ask, why bother to lather up?
Product Description
The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist — all intersect at an estate called Howards End. The fate of this country home symbolizes the future of England in an exploration of social, economic, and philosophical trends during the post-Victorian era.
Amazon.com Review
Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature: 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. Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve. Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber
Customer Review: A Novel of Edwardian Society with Disaster Looming
This brilliant classic of English literature features the clash of the artistic and social Schlegel sisters--Margaret and Helen--with the business oriented and pragmatic Wilcox men--Henry and his sons Charles and Paul. All are wealthy. This is a novel of comfortable upper-class Edwardian life set in London and rural England.
Although written in 1910, Howards End is amazingly contemporary and relevant. Of course, the conflict between the personal and the practical, the artistic and the commercial is ever-present. Also Forster touches cleverly on many other societal issues that are current. We read about the motor car just beginning its dynasty in 1910; indeed the automobile is almost another character in the novel--mute and ominous. There are also insightful passages about pollution and environmental issues, urban sprawl, and a wonderful discussion of the commercialization of Christmas, among many other fascinating discussions some shallow others deep. I was particularly interested in Forster's exploration of the practical and commercial as the necessary underpinning of the artistic and personal. At one point Margaret says that money is the "warp of life," a metaphor based on the warp and woof of the weaver's cloth (a clever pun also).
One aspect of reading Howards End that I felt continually, but seems not to have been mentioned by other reviewers, is the giant tentacles of the ugly octopus of World War I looming darkly over the characters and their futures. Neither the author in 1910 nor his characters, the half German Schlegel sisters nor the very British Wilcoxes, could know that a great war that would end their peaceful and prosperous Edwardian era was soon to begin. Throughout the novel the issues of German and English culture are in the background. The Schlegel sisters met the Wilcoxes in Germany. The Schlegels often have relatives visiting from Germany, and Helen returns there toward the end of the novel. Only slight foreboding hints of a coming disaster are slinking here and there. At one point just in passing early in the book Forster says that war with Germany is inevitable because the newspapers say it is. The war was a result of the commercial and military competition of Great Britain and Germany which was already anxious and worrisome in 1910, although no one could anticipate what a monumental crisis it would provoke. Almost twenty percent of all upper-class British males were killed in action in the war--over 40 million casualties total for all combatants in World War I.
Howards End is just as readable and fascinating now as it must have been in 1910, and it was a popular success. I do not believe, however, that it would have even been conceivable just five years later. So much had changed by 1915. World War I--1914-1918--was roiling the entire civilization of Europe. The old ways were dissolving on the battlefields France and Belgium. The easy intercourse of the Schegels with Germany and their German relatives would be impossible. Indeed the Schegel sisters themselves would be suspect and isolated in England. (Perhaps though they would find their fulfilment as volunteer military nurses as many Germans living in England did.) Paul and Charles would be in the trenches at Ypres if they were still alive, not in business in London or strutting about the colonial empire. Everything would change so fast so soon. As I read this novel I felt every moment the monumental disasters stalking the Schegels and Wilcoxes and their world, disasters that would make their current personal trials seem rather puny. For me this gave the novel an extra frisson of tension and awe.
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