Howards End
Forster's masterpiece asks what happens when three English families collide over a modest country house that comes to symbolize everything: money and memory, roots and resurrection. The Wilcoxes have built an empire and think they understand what matters. The Schlegel siblings have books and ideas and believe connection is everything. Then there's the young couple from below stairs, hoping for a foothold. When death and inheritance tangle these lives together, Forster reveals how fragile the barriers between classes really are, and how desperately we need to bridge them. "Only connect" reads the novel's epigraph, and in those two words lives its entire argument. This is a novel about the ache of trying to truly know someone from a different world. It is also a magnificent comedy of manners, with Forster's wit deployed like a surgeon's scalpel against the pretensions and blind spots of Edwardian England. But beneath the sparkle lies something urgent: can a society built on exclusion survive its own contradictions?
Editions
X-Ray
“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.””
— E. M. Forster
“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.””
— E. M. Forster
“Only connect!””
— E. M. Forster
“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.””
— E. M. Forster
“She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.””
— E. M. Forster
“The house was very quiet, and the fog”
— E. M. Forster
“While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea””
— E. M. Forster
“The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.””
— E. M. Forster
“She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. 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.””
— E. M. Forster
