Howards End Summary: Forster's Novel of Class, Family and a House Worth Fighting Over
What Howards End is about
E. M. Forster conceived Howards End in June 1908, worked on it through the following year, and finished it in July 1910. It was published that same year. Many readers and critics regard it as his masterpiece. The subject is social convention in turn-of-the-century England: codes of conduct, money, and what people owe one another across the lines of class.
The story turns on two families and the distance between them. The Schlegels are intellectual, idealistic and comfortable without being rich. The Wilcoxes are wealthy and conventional, built on business and property. The two families met in Germany and became friendly. When Helen Schlegel visits the Wilcoxes at their country house in Hertfordshire, Howards End, she becomes engaged to Paul, the second eldest Wilcox son. Both regret the decision almost at once and the engagement is broken off.
Months later the Wilcoxes take a house in London, near the Schlegels. Margaret, Helen's elder sister, becomes close to Ruth Wilcox, the mother of the family, who feels a deep and private attachment to Howards End. At the same time the Schlegels are facing the loss of their own childhood home, Wickham Place, because the lease is running out. A third thread arrives by accident. Helen mistakenly takes the umbrella of a young clerk, Leonard Bast, who is trying to educate and raise himself. When he comes to retrieve it, Margaret gives him her card, and a friendship starts that neither side fully understands.
From there the novel becomes a study of what happens when well-meaning people interfere in a life they do not understand, and what happens when a house is promised to one person and kept by another.
The main characters
Margaret Schlegel is the novel's centre. She is thoughtful, practical, and willing to forgive more than her sister thinks is right. Her friendship with Ruth Wilcox, and later her relationship with Henry, drive most of the plot.
Helen Schlegel is the younger sister, quicker to passion and quicker to judge. Her brief engagement to Paul Wilcox opens the book, and her anger at how the Wilcoxes treat the Basts shapes its second half.
Ruth Wilcox is the matriarch, and her bond with the house at Howards End is the moral engine of the story. After complications following surgery, she writes a note leaving the house to Margaret, then dies. Her husband and children find the note, consider whether Margaret exerted undue influence, dismiss the idea, and burn it anyway, reasoning that the Schlegels already have a home at Wickham Place.
Henry Wilcox is her widower. He is capable, blunt and certain of his own rightness, with a past he has never disclosed. Charles Wilcox, his eldest son, is the most hostile to the Schlegels, convinced that Margaret is after the house.
Leonard Bast is the clerk who wants books and culture and cannot afford either. He lives with, and later marries, Jacky, a former prostitute. On Henry's casual warning that Leonard's insurance company is about to collapse, the Schlegel sisters advise him to resign. The advice ruins him.
The themes
Class is the obvious one, but Forster is specific about it. The Schlegels can debate how best to improve Leonard's situation because they have the leisure to debate. Leonard has no margin at all. One piece of second-hand financial advice, passed along in good faith, is enough to destroy him. The novel is honest about how little the comfortable understand about the cost of their own kindness.
Property and inheritance run alongside. Howards End itself is the question the book keeps asking: who should own a place, the person who holds the deeds or the person who belongs to it? Ruth's note and the family's decision to burn it set that argument in motion and it is never really settled by law.
Then there is forgiveness, and whether it is distributed evenly. Margaret forgives Henry a great deal. Helen watches her do it and objects. When Helen later needs the same forgiveness from Henry, the double standard becomes impossible to ignore, and Margaret says so.
How it ends
This section gives away the ending. At the wedding of Henry's daughter Evie, Henry recognises Jacky as his former mistress and accuses the Schlegels and Basts of conspiring against him. Margaret is shaken but forgives him and marries him. Helen and Leonard spend a night together, after which Helen leaves the country. Her pregnancy is discovered later when Margaret and Henry find her at Howards End.
Henry refuses to extend to Helen the forgiveness Margaret gave him. The next day Leonard comes to the house, unaware Helen is there. Charles attacks him. Leonard falls into a bookcase, which collapses on him, and he dies of heart failure from an undiagnosed condition. Charles is charged with manslaughter, found guilty and sent to prison. Broken by it, Henry finally honours Ruth's wish and leaves Howards End to Margaret, with the property to pass after her death to the son of Helen and Leonard. Helen returns, and the family takes her and the child in.
Why it still matters
The ending is the argument. The house does not go to the family that bought it or to the son who defended it. It goes to Margaret and then to the child of a clerk who was destroyed by a stray remark at a dinner table. Forster lets the Wilcox world keep its money and lose its claim. That is why the book has outlasted the Edwardian setting that produced it, and why the house in Hertfordshire has become one of the most recognisable addresses in English fiction.
