Howards End - E.M. Forster

Category: Adults, Classic, Historical Fiction, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: E.M. Forster

Written by E.M. Forster
Read by Colleen Prendergast
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins, original source: Audible

Files: split into approx 30 min segments (not by chapter)

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The disregard of a dying woman’s bequest, a girl’s attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End.

There, the lives of three families become entangled. The Wilcoxes, who own the estate, are a wealthy family who made their fortune in the American colonies. The Schlegel siblings - Margaret, Helen, and Tibby - are lively socialites whose spirited and active lifestyles are representative of the intellectual bourgeoisie. And the Basts are a young couple from a lower-class background who are struggling to survive. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End.

Through the fate of the estate - as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it - Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.
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Over the years, Howards End has remained one of Forster’s most beloved novels. Few works combine social comedy and political commentary with the skilful characterizations seen in the Schlegel sisters. Writing during a time of lively discussion about his country’s socio-economic conditions, Forster conceived the work as a “condition-of-England novel,” a work designed to enter Edwardian debates about wealth and poverty, art and pragmatism, country life and urban sprawl that would not have sounded unfamiliar in Thatcher’s England or Reagan’s America. Forster, with a comic suspicion of the dogmas championed by liberals and conservatives alike, provides a distinctly humanistic perspective on some of the central debates of his time and ours.

Ultimately, Howards End is the most optimistic expression of Forster’s unique vision, a sensibility that transcends the temporal confines of his novel. Its richly drawn characters and the struggles they face—to maintain human connection in an increasingly depersonalized society, to find a spiritual home in the world—are still as current as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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