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The story revolves around three families in England at the beginning of the 20th century: the Wilcoxes, rich capitalists with a fortune made in the colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Helen, and Tibby), whose cultural pursuits have much in common with the Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, an impoverished young couple from a low...
- E. M. Forster
- 1910
- Margaret Schlegel. The chief protagonist of the novel, a 29- year-old woman of mixed English and German heritage living in London in the early years of the twentieth century.
- Henry Wilcox. The patriarch of the Wilcox family, a prominent businessman in London. Married to Ruth Wilcox and later to Margaret. Stuffy, conventional, and chauvinistic, Henry is the chief representative of the Wilcox family, which represents the pragmatic, materialistic aspect of the English upper classes.
- Helen Schlegel. Margaret's sister, a passionate, flighty girl of 21 who lives for art, literature, and "human relations." Like Margaret, Helen is a representative of the idealistic, cultured Schlegel family, which represents the intellectual aspect of the upper classes.
- Leonard Bast. A poor insurance clerk on the very bottom rung of the middle class--he has money for food, clothing, and a place to live, but not much else, and is constantly beset with financial worries.
The three families in Howards End occupy three different locales: the Schlegels live in London, the Wilcoxes split their time between homes in London and the countryside (easily facilitated...
E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) tells the story of two families, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, who represent different aspects of society in Edwardian England. Specifically, it follows the Margaret Schlegel, the novel’s protagonist, amid her attempts to manage her own family as she becomes engaged to and marries the widowed Mr. Wilcox.
Howards End focuses mainly on two families: the Schlegels, who represent intellectuahsm, imagination, and idealism—the inner life of the mind—and the Wilcoxes, who represent English practicality,...
The three families in Howards End each represent different levels of the middle class. The Schlegels occupy the middle position, somewhere between the Basts, who exist at the lower fringes of the middle class, and the Wilcoxes, who belong to the upper-middle class.
Howards End, set in England in the early 1900s, follows three seemingly incompatible families, the Schlegels, the Basts, and the Wilcoxes, as they pursue intellectual and material advancement in a nation that is theoretically becoming more democratic.
