Howards End (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Howards End is a novel for the likes of us. That is to say, for you and me: you because you have bought this particular book, and I because I am writing about it, and because I love it. You may be buying the book for a variety of reasons; you may be in a train station or an airport or browsing in a bookshop on a rainy day, hoping for many things: enlightenment, friendship, amorous adventure, cappuccino. You may want to chip away at that mountain of the canon you have not read. You may be buying it because you must, because you have been told by a teacher that Howards End is something you must read in order to pass a course. But however disparate all our motives are, whether our relationship to the book is, like mine, that of a loving old friend, or perhaps as yours may be, as a fearful or hopeful or wary stranger, Forster makes us a “we” with the novel’s very first sentence: “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” We are part of a company; it is a formal one to be sure—the impersonal pronoun “one” is used, but the “we” is implied, because we are being shown something intimate, domestic—Helen’s letters to her sister. We don’t know Helen’s last name, or anything about her, but we are immediately included in her private life. Yet the first sentence of her letter to Meg might serve as a warning to readers who are about to become one of the Howards End “we”: “‘It isn’t going to be what we expected.”’

Edward Morgan Forster lived a life devoted to the ideas of decency, humaneness, the civilized private life in which the disparities of the human condition might be resolved by honesty and goodwill. At the same time, he was aware of the dark goblins that Helen, and Beethoven, found in the symphony that forms a meditation in the beginning of Howards End. Tragedy struck Forster’s life early; his father died in 1881, when he was only two; he was brought up by a mother and aunts, lived quietly with them until he was exiled to public school, a nightmare for him. Rescued by the University of Cambridge, he was taken up by a brilliant group of young men (among whom he was considered one of the least brilliant) who gathered around the philosopher G. E. Moore. Moore’s ideas stressed the primacy of personal relations and the appreciation of beauty in a good life. The members of this group included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and a Liverpool Jew named Leonard Woolf who would marry Virginia, sister of another member, Toby Stephen. He studied the classics; traveled, particularly to Italy; sought minor employment. Between 1903 and 1910 he wrote four novels: A Room with a View, The Longest Journey, Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Howards End. He finished a novel about homosexuality, Maurice, in 1913, but did not publish it in his lifetime. There was, therefore, a publication lapse of fourteen years, and then in 1924 A Passage to India. And then no novels for the rest of his long life. He was made a member of King’s College, Cambridge, and died there in 1970.

How to explain the early prodigiousness, followed by the long silence. Is it that the world he knew was erased by the trauma of World War I? Virginia Woolf assures us in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that in December 1910, human nature changed. Did the change paralyze him? Or was it that he felt silenced by his inability to write honestly about homosexual life? Howards End was published just before Virginia Woolf’s December 1910 sell-by date, so perhaps the assurance of the voice is the assurance of the full maturity of a way of life that knows itself about to be obsolete.

The tone of this book is one of conviviality, well-bred judicious-ness, a quiet urge to please. It belies the book’s tremendous scope, its willingness to take on some of the large questions that we live by, some of the large problems that make us wonder if, in the words of Henry James, “the game is worth the candle.” Death, sex, birth, class, money, property: All these are gracefully folded in the book’s capacious mantle. I disagree strongly with Lionel Trilling’s verdict that “He is sometimes irritating in his refusal to be great” (E. M. Forster: A Study, p. 9; see “For Further Reading”). To my mind Forster has not refused greatness; what he has refused is the tone of voice that trumpets its own greatness and the greatness of its intent. The lightness of his voice has led even his admirers, such as his friend Virginia Woolf, to undervalue the weight of his achievements. For he does ask the weighty questions. But these questions are spoken, for the most part, in a tone that is typically English in its diffidence. This tone is complex, and allows Forster many complex effects; indeed, this complexity of tone is one of the marks of Forster’s greatness.

So absorbed are we in the fates of Howards End’s characters Margaret and Helen Schlegel, Henry Wilcox, and Leonard Bast that we often forget that there is an omniscient, and indeed sometimes intrusive, narrator from whom we are getting our information. Like a highly trained manservant, he makes reassuring noises to let us know he’s there—without ever making himself a part of the action. We hear murmurings such as: “Young Wilcox was pouring in petrol, starting his engine, and performing other actions with which this story has no concern” (p. 16), and “Another touch, and the account of her day is finished” (p. 192).

The narrator has a sense of humor, which often expresses itself in delightful generalizations that make the reader say, “Of course they are all like that, only I’ve never thought of it.” Among the most amusing are those that refer to Dolly and Evie Wilcox. When Margaret sees Dolly’s photograph, the narrator remarks: “Dolly looked silly, and had one of those triangular faces that so often prove attractive to a robust man” (p. 67). Evie Wilcox, waiting in front of a restaurant, is described as “staring fiercely at nothing after the fashion of athletic women” (p. 140). And here is Evie with her puppies: “‘This is Ahab, that’s Jezebel,’ said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history” (p. 131). The joke is even better when we realize that there are indeed dog references connected to Jezebel and Ahab, and they aren’t pretty—they refer to dogs licking the blood of the dead, and behaving in other charming doggy ways.

Occasionally the narrator’s light tone darkens, and he speaks truths that would seem more appropriate in the mouth of a Victorian narrator, the kind of narrator that Forster and Woolf and the novelists Woolf referred to as the Georgians were trying to pare away from their more slender forms. In his use of this narrative voice, Forster risks tendentiousness, sentimentality, to speak what he believes to be the truth required by the novel’s larger purpose, as when he says: “It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave” (p. 96). Or: “Where there is no money and no inclination to violence, tragedy cannot be generated” (p. 115). Either or both of these sentences are open to our disagreement; but we are arrested by the large terms they invoke.

The scene in which the Wilcox family decides not to let Margaret know that Ruth has bequeathed Howards End to her contains a paragraph that demonstrates the suppleness of Forster’s use of narrative voice:

The discussion moved towards its close.

To follow it is unnecessary. It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not. The appeal was too flimsy. It was not legal; it had been written in illness, and under the spell of a sudden friendship; it was contrary to the dead woman’s intentions in the past, contrary to her very nature, so far as that nature was understood by them. To them Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir. And—pushing one step farther in these mists—may they not have decided even better than they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood? No; the Wilcoxes are not to be blamed. The problem is too terrific, and they could not even perceive a problem. No; it is natural and fitting that after due debate they should tear the note up and throw it on to their dining-room fire. The practical moralist may acquit them absolutely. He who strives to look deeper may acquit them—almost. For one hard fact remains. They did neglect a personal appeal. The woman who had died did say to them: “Do this,” and they answered: “We will not” (p. 93).

The narrator makes his presence palpable: “It is rather the moment when the commentator should step forward.” He presents the question as a genuine question: “Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret,” and at first he seems to be on their side. The note was written in pencil; Ruth was ill—it wasn’t the sort of thing she would have done in her right mind. The conflict is set up, though, between the rights of the spirit, which are questionable, and what is natural and fitting—the seemingly obvious. But the sentence that follows, the one that assures us that the Wilcoxes are not to be blamed, turns on itself midway. “The problem is too terrific, and they could not even perceive a problem.” The second half of the sentence marks them as deficient. The paragraph then embarks upon an unsteady decrescendo. “The practical moralist may acquit them absolutely.” Fine: Who would argue with the practical moralist? Only, there is the impulse to strive deeper; and even such a striver could acquit them—almost. How powerful the simple word “almost.” On these two syllables turns the whole moral force of the paragraph, indeed the situation. For all the arguments carefully built up fall to ruins with the force of the final accusation—and it can only be an accusation : A dying woman’s request has been denied, and we have been made to see that there are not two sides to the question at all.

Another achievement of Forster’s narrative voice is that it allows the land of England to become as real to us as any of the characters of Howards End. This character’s genius is not passionate, but comradely, as the wych-elm of Howards End is not a towering giant, but a gentle comrade:

The wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent (p. 192).

As this dear comrade, the England of the pastoral imagination, seems in danger of being swallowed up by the Wilcoxes and their kind, Forster poses the question: Whose is England? This question is placed at that moment in the novel when England is being presented not as a comrade this time, but as a sensual, vibrantly alive woman:

England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (pp. 162-163).

It would seem that the endangered England, by terms passionate and comradely, is the English countryside and not London. And yet the Schlegels are Londoners born and bred; and their life is essentially cosmopolitan—antinationalist, republican of spirit, with ties to Germany, both of blood and of aesthetic inclination—the anti-German, indeed anti-Continental, attitude of both Aunt Juley and the Wilcoxes is seen to be deficient and obtuse—a species of English provincialism. (It is a task for the contemporary imagination to remember that Howards End was written before Hitler, before even World War I, when it was possible to admire Germany as a bastion of large thought—without the dark underside that these questions must always have to our ears.) Yet in the end, the Schlegels leave London for the countryside—leaving it, as it were, to its own devices, for the narrator tells us clearly that “London only stimulates, it cannot sustain” (p. 140).

The narrative voice brings alive another abstraction, not, as in the case of England, by personifying it, but simply by mentioning its name aloud, and then by turning it into a metaphor. It is possible to say that there is a shadow-character in Howards End: His name is money.

If sex cannot be mentioned among the respectable English, the taboo among English intellectuals is money. Particularly its importance. This hypocrisy Margaret Schlegel will not have: She insists upon telling the truth about the importance of money as she will later insist upon Henry’s telling the truth about the double standard in regard to sexual behavior. More than once she insists on economic plain speech: “‘Money pads the edges of things,’ said Miss Schlegel. ‘God help those who have none’” (p. 57).

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin” (p. 57).

Arguably, one of the most important functions of Howards End is its exploration of the relations between the sexes. England and money, culture and art, the significance of death: These are certainly important elements in the novel, but all the actions, from the very beginning to the very end, center around love, marriage, mating, and begetting. From Paul and Helen’s first kiss to Leonard Bast’s death, the attraction between the sexes has been the novel’s underpinning. Yet not only that which brings them together is important to this novel; it is clear in pointing out the differences between the sexes, and the difficulties of reconciling these differences. Once more, the grand sweep made possible by Forster’s use of narrative voice comes into play when the narrator wonders:

Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going? Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this?... out of Nature’s device we have built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call; far wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the farmyard and the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not contemplate. “Men did produce one jewel,” the gods will say, and, saying, will give us immortality (p. 223).

The Schlegel and Wilcox houses represent the extremes of the masculine and the feminine as seen in modes of living. The Wilcoxes are rugged outdoorsmen (except for a little problem with hay fever); their “hands are on the ropes” of money and business; they have little toleration for introspection or expression; the world of the arts is entirely foreign to them. Theirs is, in Helen’s words, the world of “telegrams and anger,” and both the Schlegel women are, in their different ways, responsive to this world’s appeal. Early in the novel Margaret says: “‘The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there.... This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?’” (p. 25). Forster clearly makes the point that without Henry Wilcox’s modern interventions, Howards End would have fallen into ruin.

The Wilcoxes, in their hypermasculinity, try to bypass personal relations, but Helen sees the limits of their strategy. “‘I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness’” (p. 24).

What is the place of Ruth Wilcox, wife and mother, who would seem to represent the eternal feminine, in this family of guys? It would seem that as a mother and a wife she is not much of a success. She cannot keep her husband faithful; she cannot pass her values down to her children. She is successful only as a ghost, in the world where the real difficulties of the sexes, rooted in the flesh, disappear.

Similarly, Henry Wilcox, who prides himself on practicality, makes a series of costly mistakes in the acquiring of real estate. It is Margaret Schlegel Wilcox, or perhaps it should be punctuated as Schlegel-Wilcox, who unites the generosity of spirit and fearlessness of vision that is the best of her family’s feminine tradition, with the clear-sightedness and gift for forward moving that is the best of the Wilcoxes.

These virtues come to fruition in Margaret’s plain dealing during the crisis of Helen’s pregnancy. Margaret’s confrontation of Henry when he refuses to allow Helen to spend the night at Howards End is as successful an exposure of the double standard in male and female sexual behavior as can be found anywhere in literature:

“You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. 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, man, are you. You can’t recognize 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. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told you what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent. Only say to yourself: ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done” (pp. 286-287).

Forster’s utopian ending is a place of neither male nor female domination : It is not that the male must best the female or the female the male. It is not that the traditionally male virtues must be abolished, or the traditionally female ones suppressed. “Only connect” is the book’s superscript, after all, and it is the connection of the male and female that is the true map to the land of sanity.

And yet, in the end Howards End is a house of female habitation, and the happy life that is lived there is built on the corpse of a young man: Leonard Bast.

The narrator’s remarks on Leonard Bast can make the reader uncomfortable: They are the pebble in the comfortable old shoe, forcing the reader to ask the question: “Is this a novel, in the end, of snobbery?” The narrator’s digressions at the beginning of chapter 6, when we follow Leonard home to his dreary flat, set the terms of his relationship to Leonard not just as an individual, but as a type, and set the social boundaries of his attentions. The chapter begins: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk” (p. 43).

The narrator goes on with his ruminations, which can sound like echoes of social Darwinism:

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming: “All men are equalall men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts and the statements of Democracy are inaudible (p. 43).

How do we hear these words without wincing? How can we accept the high-handedness of the tone, which says “there is not the least doubt of it” to the assertion “he was inferior to most rich people”? We might almost believe, for a moment, that E. M. Forster, author of Two Cheers for Democracy, is reducing the cheers to one, or maybe none at all, that this defender of the liberal position is retreating to a high-Tory pastoralism, nostalgic and hierarchical, in opposition to the modern, urban civilization that has allowed for the upward social mobility of Leonard Bast and his kind.

In his private life Forster had his happiest sexual encounters with men of a lower class than his own, and this connection of primal virility with working-class roots can be seen in his depiction of Leonard. Margaret, whose libido is activated by the muscle-bound and copper-complexioned Henry, is not susceptible to Leonard’s manly charms, but nevertheless remarks upon his “hint of primitive good looks” (p. 108). And Henry Wilcox senses Leonard’s allure: Encountering Leonard in the Schlegel drawing room, he is jealous, and this fuels his passion for Margaret and presses him to take practical steps in her direction.

This class-inflected virility, as well as a desire to comfort the victim, is what draws Helen to Leonard as a lover: “A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.... She and the victim seemed alone in a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour” (p. 295). The juxtaposition of “absolutely” and “half an hour” has, to be sure, its ironic component ; yet Forster was a firm believer in the mysterious, irrational, impermanent, amoral, and yet life-giving powers of passionate sexual love, and it is only as a result of this fleeting encounter that Howards End can be inhabited as Ruth Wilcox wished.

Forster never allows Leonard Bast to drown in a wash of sentimentality. Leonard, too, is snobbish, is suspicious, and in his financial desperation he turns into a moral blackmailer: He threatens his family with showing up on their doorstep with the disreputable Jacky, his lawful wife, unless they send pound notes in the mail. But we cannot forget that it is Henry Wilcox’s bad financial advice that is the cause of Leonard’s ruin. The Schlegels, drunk with ideas after their ladies’ discussion group has spent the evening pondering the question “What Shall I Do with My Money?”, run into Henry Wilcox on the Chelsea embankment. They ask him his opinion of Leonard’s situation; he tells them to advise their young man to quit his situation as an insurance clerk immediately. They pass on his advice; it is the wrong advice; Henry’s prognostications were mistaken (as his real estate speculations were mistakes) and Leonard’s ruin follows. The Schlegels feel responsible; Henry does not. In the course of the development of capitalism, after all, there will be some victims. It is no one’s fault, certainly not his own.

And, in the end, Leonard is expendable to the Schlegels as well. In the interests of truthful speaking, Margaret encourages her sister to put Leonard from her mind:

“I can’t have you worrying about Leonard. Don’t drag in the personal when it will not come. Forget him.”

“Yes, yes, but what has Leonard got out of life?”

“Perhaps an adventure.”

“Is that enough?”

“Not for us. But for him” (pp. 314-315).

Discussions of birth, death, sex, money, class, whole pages devoted to a description of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: Howards End is in many ways a garrulous book. Helen and Margaret belong to what has been called “the chattering classes,” and their long chunks of dialogue are full of ideas and ideals. Yet there are moments when Forster seems to question the propriety of putting important words into complex sentences, and seems to grant real wisdom to those who are least conventionally articulate. Ruth Wilcox, the presiding spirit of the novel, speaks very little, and in her exchange with Margaret, the worth of Margaret’s volubility is called into question by Ruth’s response:

“Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged—well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in—to live by proportion. Don’t i with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed, and a deadlock—Gracious me, I’ve started preaching!”

“Indeed, you put the difficulties of life splendidly,” said Mrs. Wilcox, withdrawing her hand into the deeper shadows. “It is just what I should have liked to say about them myself” (p. 69).

A similar pattern can be observed in Helen’s exchange with Leonard Bast. She cries out, earnestly:

“But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, ‘I am I”’ (p. 221).

Similarly, the enigmatic Miss Avery’s cryptic comments seem more truth-bearing than Margaret’s explanations and assertions of why the Schlegel furniture cannot be allowed to stay at Howards End. With a few syllables, she makes Margaret see her superior understanding—and Margaret disloyally concurs with her view of the Wilcoxes: “Wilcoxes are better than nothing.... They keep a place going” (p. 254). Only Miss Avery seems to acknowledge the human tragedy of Leonard’s death. She says, “No one ever told the lad he’ll have a child” (p. 307). And when Margaret tries to explain to Helen how she settled everyone and everything down, she says, “Things that I can’t phrase have helped me” (p. 315).

Things that can’t be phrased are an important element of this novel, an ironic counterpoint to the parts of it that honor the rational, the honorable, the clear. Certainly, the confrontation between Margaret and Henry, in which she exposes his hypocrisy and her and Ruth Wilcox’s part in enabling it, is a triumph of plain speech. And yet, brooding over everything is the ghost of Ruth Wilcox. Margaret says: “I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it” (p. 292). And the hope of the future comes about, not as a result of rational planning, but because of the birth of Leonard and Helen’s child, not a virgin birth, but a birth that is the fruit of a half hour of absolute love, or perhaps absolute desire. The novel, for all its urbane civility, is importantly shaped by elements of the supernatural, and not only the ghostly Ruth Wilcox. The plot, though comic in that it ends happily, is a closer relative to religious myth than it is to the ordinary marriage tale, the staple of the comedy we are most familiar with. And Howards End definitely has elements of the allegorical in it: Consider the names of the leading characters. The idealistic women are named after an idealistic German philosopher, Schlegel; the representatives of the imperial masculine are named Wilcox, the phallus that wills. And Leonard Bast, who is everyone’s victim, is called by the name of a flexible bark that can be used to make mats or the soles of shoes.

But the allegorical element of the plot of Howards End makes itself felt most clearly in the fate of Leonard Bast, who can be read as the scapegoat, a figure that comes to the West from both Athens and Jerusalem: a figure that is important in both Greek and Jewish thinking. The scapegoat was an animal who was meant to bear the sins of the community; his sacrifice was required in order that the community might be cleansed of its (not his) sins, and therefore go on to prosper. The goat was killed in the temple, as Leonard is killed in the domestic temple of Howards End. The death of Leonard Bast enables the happy habitation of Ruth Wilcox’s house. Without his death, Margaret would have left Henry and gone to live abroad with Helen. The important injunction to “only connect” would not have been obeyed.

Forster was not a pure allegorist, and Leonard-as-scapegoat breaks down because Leonard is not, as we have seen, a pure innocent : The detail of his moral blackmail of his family sees to that. He, of course, considers himself a sinner in having had sex with Helen; he comes to Howards End to confess. “Mrs. Wilcox, I have done wrong” (p. 301) is the sentence he rehearses on the walk up to the house, and the sentence he speaks upon entering it. Upon saying these words, he is fatally struck by Charles Wilcox, brandishing the ancestral Schlegel sword. It is impossible not to see, if not allegorical, then certainly symbolic elements in the circumstances of Leonard’s death. Killed by a blow from the sword of a German idealist, he pulls down a bookcase and dies covered with the very books he had looked on as his road to a better life.

In religious terms, he dies shriven after confession of a sin that he (but not the reader) considers heinous. The hideous Charles goes to jail; Henry is broken but achieves wisdom; Margaret and Helen live together according to Ruth Wilcox’s wishes. Leonard is dead, but what would life have held for him anyway? Or so we are made to think.

The book’s last acts are acts of language. Margaret and Helen understand each other completely, neatly dividing the traditional spheres of women: Helen declares she cannot love a man, Margaret that she cannot love a child. Henry admits to having kept from his second wife the truth of his first wife’s legacy, and is forgiven—more, told that there was nothing to forgive.

The last words are Helen‘s, not Margaret’s, Helen, whose passionate, rash acts initiated the happy fate, not Margaret, whose intelligent and sensitive understanding brought it to fruition. The last words are hers, as are the first words (except for the narrator, always a good host, making his introduction). And the last word is the one that blasts all rationality, all notions of calm and logical progress. This word is “never.”

“‘It’ll be such a crop of hay as never!’” Helen says, and we know what she means, in the literal sense: such a crop of hay as we’ve never seen here, or has never been before. But what an evasive and ambiguous word to end a novel on! The word that is the ultimate negation, that suggests that what is hoped for is ultimately impossible, a delusion. The word allows for a circular reading not only of the sentence, but of the book itself. Its potency is in its shimmer: It is a word we think we’ve caught, only to find it has escaped our grasp.

Novel of the sexes, novel of the classes, pastoral novel, allegorical novel, novel of the cultured few: The richness of Howards End is that it can be read in all these ways, and more. The pleasure of it is the ease of its reading: the achievement of a voice unparalleled for its lightness and its subtlety, a tense, fine filament that can support the weight of its ideas without the slightest hint of strain.

Mary Gordon is a McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Her novels have been best-sellers: Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, and Spending. She has published a memoir, The Shadow Man; a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; and two books of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls and Seeing Through Places. Her most recent work is a biography of Joan of Arc. Mary has received the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For three years (1983, 1997, and 2000), she was the recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. Acknowledgments