Critical Reception

Abstract

Howards End was published in 1910. Its early reviewers were in general enthusiastic about Forster’s progress. One review called it ‘the year’s best novel’, and more than one spoke of its combination of persuasive generalisation and sharply observed surface detail. There were some dissenting voices about the probability of character and event, and some reviewers believed that the novel was spoiled by melodrama and by the author’s willingness to sacrifice probability to the demands of the design of his novel. The strongest objections were to the probability of Helen’s love affair with Leonard Bast, though one reviewer was equally shocked by Margaret’s marriage to Mr Wilcox. The same reviewer believed that the finer feelings of Margaret Schlegel should not have been sacrificed in favour of enlarging her sympathies which the Wilcoxes: ‘we cannot admit that what is bad ought to be loved’, (unsigned review, Athenaeum, 3 December 1910). This reviewer might have agreed with D. H. Lawrence, who wrote to Forster in 1915, ‘broken Henry’s (sic) remain Henry’s as I know to my cost’ and later, ‘I think you did make a nearly deadly mistake glorifying those business people in Howards End. Business is no good’. Another friend of Forster’s however, A. C. Benson, ‘took the book rather to be a study of the immense strength of sturdy, conventional humanity’.