Ideas of Order in Howards End

Abstract

Readers have persistently criticized the conclusion of Howards End since the novel’s appearance in autumn 1910; early reviewers, while almost unanimous in praising the novel as a whole, anticipated with considerable accuracy the judgement on the ending that most later critics have rendered.¹ In his influential critical study of Forster, Lionel Trilling voices the general feeling that ‘the nearly allegorical reconciliation is rather forced’, and expresses displeasure with the final ‘rather contrived scene of busyness and contentment in the hayfield’.² Forster himself eventually joined this general consensus; he wrote in 1959 that the conclusion of Howards End is ‘certainly unsatisfactory, but perhaps [was] less so at the time’.³ The qualification is significant, however, because it suggests that an ending which no longer holds up in 1959 may have been worth attempting in 1910. I do not wish to overturn completely the traditional assessment of Forster’s flawed achievement in the conclusion to Howards End. But I would like to explore what he was attempting to achieve, try to see why it went wrong, and suggest how the ending anticipates later modernist endings that were more successful. Because these issues involve questions about Forster’s formal and aesthetic intentions, I would like to begin by exploring his general views on fiction and art.