While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea.
Howards End (1910), a novel by British writer E.M. Forster, paints an incisive picture of social conventions, codes of conduct, and the class divide in turn-of-the- century England. In 1998, this critically acclaimed novel was ranked 38th on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best English language novels of the 20th century.
Howards End revolves around the lives and loves of three families in England in the early 20th century— the wealthy Wilcoxes who have made a huge fortune in the colonies; the half-German Schlegel sisters, Margaret, Helen, and Tibby, whose progressive ideals are aligned with those of the Bloomsbury Group, and the Basts, a poor young couple from a lower-class background who struggle to make ends meet. The Schlegel sisters are keen to help the less fortunate Basts. They also try to persuade the Wilcoxes to shed their deep-rooted prejudices.
Beautifully written and intricately plotted, Howards End offers readers an extraordinarily insightful glimpse of pre-war English society.