Caught in the storm is Leonard Bast, a young clerk who aspires to culture, but is trapped in poverty and conventional morality. (Forster dichotomises Germany and England as, respectively, idealistic and pragmatic.) The Schlegels become entangled with an archetypal British family: the Wilcoxes, a landowning industrialist family who ride roughshod over clerks, streetcats, and any obstacles in the way of their well-intentioned, thickskinned capitalist efficiency. Their German father and their British mother are dead the sisters have grown up in Britain, but their values and sensibilities lean German. Meg and Helen Schlegel are two sisters, in their 20s when the novel begins. Forster illuminates the unrests and upheavals of Edwardian England, and offers insights that, while tinged with his trademark mysticism, delve in their poetry deeper than prose. Written in the shadow of the Great War, Howards End is shot through with anxiety about the great imminent conflict, and attempts a resolution via Forster’s favourite formula: “personal relations.” England, Germany, and the compromise between them are all embodied as fully individuated characters, playing out personal conflicts in turn-of-the-century Britain. If A Passage to India meditates on the possibility of true friendship between Indian and Britisher under colonial conditions, then Howards End considers the possibility of keeping the peace between Britain and Germany.

While his characters are vivid and unique, they exist primarily as embodiments of ideas.

Howards end kindle