Howards End: From Letters to a Connecting Vision

Abstract

This is the famous, unassuming opening of Howards End, but why does Forster choose a letter as the way into the story? And why letters as the first means of communication between the sisters, instead of dialogue, which opens Antigone and which is used in both Middlemarch and Women in Love? The first dialogues in those two novels take place in sitting rooms, and the tone of each, different as they are from each other, retains some sort of dramatic power, despite the constraint in the social and private life of the sisters. That dramatic tension is lacking in Helen’s letters, because letters are one-way communication, and because she and ‘Meg’ seem on such close and easy terms. Her tone is casual and relaxed. She doesn’t mind - is even delighted - if ‘what we expected’ proves wrong. Her letters seem to dismiss grandeur.