I recently finished reading Howards End by E. M. Forster. What else can I say except how beautiful and lyrical it was. I picked it up, thinking I was going to read Maurice (obviously not remembering that Maurice was called Maurice) and got a chapter or two into it before realising I wasn’t reading quite what I’d expected.
Howards End by E. M. Forster
Nevertheless, I kept on. The plot centres around the lives of the Schlegel sisters and their interactions with the Wilcox family. Set in the early 1900s in England, it’s essentially a book about the wealthy middle class, those people who are wealthy enough not to work but not in the aristocracy. It examines life and death, love, family and the connections between people.
To be honest, not a lot happens in the book, yet it seems filled with action and plot as the characters travel through years until they come to some sort of resolution and a final statement on life. I love books that progress through a number of years of the characters’ lives, exploring a rich family history and revealing how people and circumstances change through time. Perhaps that’s why I like immortal characters like vampires etc. Their history.
I also liked this book for the way it was written, the stream of consciousness that comes through and carries the reader on musical phrases. It’s an old story, to be sure, telling of its time but it resonated with me and I’m glad to have kept reading.
I’ll attempt Maurice soon. My initial reason for reading it was to see how Forster deals with love between two men. While that still holds true, it’s now not the whole reason and I’m looking forward to being swept away in his poetic use of language once more.
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