"To me," D. H. Lawrence once wrote to Fotster, "'you are the last Englishman." Last seems a bit extravagant perhaps, but one can see, reading Howards End, what Lawrence meant. It is not simply that Forster wrote in the English tradition of Jane Austen and George Eliot, nor that he set his novel in England and populated it with English characters. It is rather that in his novels, and in this one in particular, he wrote about his country with a mixture of love and nostalgia, creating a Myth of England the last Englishman might conceive it.
Take, as an example, the beginning of Chapter 19. Forster's narrator is on the Purbeck Hills, pointing out the beauties of England for the benefit of foreigners...
What makes this masterpiece a pure delight for contemporary readers is its clear, vibrant portrait of life in Edwardian England, and the wonderful characters who inhabit the charming old country house in Hertfordshire called Howards End. This cozy house becomes the object of an inheritance dispute between the upright conservative Wilcox family and the Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret,sensitive and intuitive women loved by men willing to leap wide social barriers to fulfill their ardor. Through romantic entanglements,disappearing wills and sudden tragedy, the conflict over the house emerges as a symbolic struggle for England"s very future. Rich with the tradition,spirit and wit belonging only to the English,HOWARD"S END is a remarkable novel of rare insightand understanding, As in his celebrated A PASSAGE TO INDIA, E, M. Forster brings to vivid life a country and an era through the destinies of his characters.Says Stephen Spender: "He held Jp to his time a mirror which reflects in his art a Picture of civilized values."
E.M.Forster:The Last Englishman
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
......
Chapter 44
