Howards End

“Two cheers for democracy,” E. M. Forster once wrote. “One because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” Both are alive and well in Howards End, a twentieth-century classic that tracks British society’s class warfare, as seen through the eyes of three different castes. There are the Wilcoxes, a wealthy family bound by the rules of tradition and property; the cultured and emancipated Schlegel sisters; and a young man named Leonard Bast, who lives at the grim edge of poverty. Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ house in the Herefordshire countryside, is the source of their conflict—and ultimately a symbol of class conflict within English society through which Forster poses the question of who shall inherit England.