In the Library
Howards End
E.M. Forster, 1910
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 44
- Length
- Length 109k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
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- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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E.M. Forster
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Middlemarch
George Eliot
Eliot's Dorothea shares Margaret's hunger to marry her ideals to a real, flawed man, and both novels measure a marriage by whether it makes each partner larger or smaller.
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About the book
A wych elm grows outside the house called Howards End with pig's teeth driven into its bark, an old country cure for toothache, and Mrs. Wilcox is the only person in her brisk, telegram-sending family who understands why that matters. E. M. Forster's novel asks what happens when a woman who feels that kind of belonging leaves her house, on a scrap of paper nobody witnesses, to a stranger who understands it too. Margaret Schlegel is that stranger: clever, well-read, allergic to cant, and drawn despite herself into marrying a man who cannot connect the person he is at his desk to the person he is at home. Forster's famous instruction, only connect, sounds simple until you watch what it costs: Margaret's sister falls for a penniless young clerk starving himself on culture he can't afford, and the collision between the families shows exactly how much of England's beauty rests on what it refuses to see. When the fighting is over, the wych elm is still standing, and so, against every odd the novel has raised, is the house.