Howards End

The story is great. The narration is superb. Loved the prose. Its lyrical and lucid. Pick it up and read.Also have to mention, I searched the book. It was on the BBC list or something. All I did was searched for the best of English novels and this title intrigued me.Such a page turner, a riveting story. You'll have lots as takeaway.

E.M. Forster's novel has an antique ring and modern readers may find it difficult to enter into sympathy with the characters and the societal context of Edwardian England. Forster creates one of the most improbable characters in literature, Leonard Bast, and surrounds him with improbabilities: the morbid interest of two cultured women in his upliftment, the championing of his cause as their moral duty, and the readiness of one of the them to copulate with him as a recompense for poor advice given earlier. There are many themes Forster takes up: class hierarchy and the hypocrisy that lies at the bottom of it, a lament for the passing of pastoral England, socialism and whether being your brother's keeper is necessary in the modern world. Two worthy women enliven the novel: the wise Mrs Wilcox, long-suffering in her marriage to a man who shared none of her sympathies; and the mature Margaret who knew she had to put her husband in his place once, in order for the marriage to survive on a equal basis.

This is a wonderful edition of the Everyman Library classics. The hard cover inside the dust jacket is a lovely red and gold. I'm very happy with the purchase and delivery.

There are books that you get into, and there are books that you just don't get into.This is one book that I just did not relate to. Even though many people have recommended this book highly, for me - it went over my head!

If you are looking for a beautiful edition, do not buy the book. I like the size of the print and everything, but the cover spoiled the fun for me. It felt like paper and and since I am fond of collecting books, the look of this edition ruined my interest.The cover also looks a bit dirty on the back (impressions of pencil marks and those are not part of it) and can be easily damaged(just noticed a small tear) 🙄

This is happening with me for the 3rd time, that cloudtail India has delivered me a 1st or 2nd copy of a book in price of original book.The print nd paper quality of this book is so low, u can't read it properly.I would suggest everyone to stop buying products from Cloudtail India.

It was disheartening to receive a leather bound classic book in such sordid condition...with cob webs, dead spiders, dirt marks all over.

Extremely poor paper quality and printing. Disappointing packaging, book was delivered in poor condition

J'ai obtenu le format de livre que je recherchais, soit un livre à couverture souple, mais d'un format un peu plus grand qu'un livre de poche. De plus il a été livré très rapidement.

E.M. Forster’s novels epitomize the values of the Bloomsbury set to which he belonged. Howard’s End wittingly satires the highly class conscious world of Edwardian England. A Room With a View portrays the vapidity of the arranged marriages of his day and makes a convincing case for matrimony based only on romantic love.Influenced by the Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore, who thought that the good could only be intuited instead of reasoned to, the Bloomsbury authors helped accomplish a revolution in morals which is ongoing. Instead of stemming from an ancient text, or derived from reflection on the correct behavior for the rational animal, Forster pens an articulate appeal for sensitivity to the needs of every person, the goodness of the human body and a strong aversion to moral judgment.Thus, the Wilcoxes of Howard’s End orate proudly on the just desserts of their labor but blithely ignore their dying matriarch’s request to bequeath her house to someone outside the family. Mr. Wilcox is forgiven for an affair conducted with an orphaned teen, but refuses to house his sister-in-law who is pregnant out of wedlock. Throughout, upper class suitors are generally shown to be stuffy, self-obsessed and unfeeling towards the women they desire.But it is no longer the early 20th century and we can now see the results of the experiment in Bloomsbury ethics. We’ve supposedly ended loveless marriages but instead have children growing up without the stable family structure they so strongly desire. The classes are thankfully less like a caste structure, but we’ve found other affiliations, like political party, on which to divide our communities. And while the body is certainly a good, it doesn’t take the recognition that many body images have to be photoshopped to realize that something is out of sorts with our obsession around the body.I don’t feel a need to impose my philosophy on anyone, but I do think that we can use reason to establish virtues, norms and guides that transcend cultures and go beyond the simple ethic of good-heartedness and no personal judgment. But if you want to trace this source of modern mores, E.M. Forster’s early 20th century novels are perhaps the best place to start. Not only enjoyable, they subtly set about revolutionizing the world and thus they’re essential just for understanding ourselves. Highly recommended.

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.

Non avevo mai acquistato queste edizioni, ma devo dire che sono rimasta soddisfatta!La copertina è plastificata e le pagine sono di buona qualità anche se non ho apprezzato molto la presenza della linea che separa il titolo del libro dal corpo del testo, ma è un gusto estetico personale. La storia è molto bella, perché racconta dell'incontro tra classi differenti con le loro divergenze e battaglie personali. Consigliatissimo!

Uma história feminista do começo do século vinte. Interessante para se conhecer a mente de uma outra época que acabou por moldar a nossa.