by An evening with E. M. Forster 1910 novel about two sisters and a divided England, and a royal row that badly needs its famous epigraph
Tuesday, the Armchair
Tuesday night, rain against the window, a pot of tea and my battered copy of Howards End, which E. M. Forster published in 1910. I reread it every autumn. It is the story of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, cultured and idealistic, and their entanglement with the Wilcoxes, a family of businessmen who own a house called Howards End. It is about class, money, property, England and, above all, whether people who see the world very differently can ever truly understand each other.
Its epigraph is two words long: Only connect. I have it pencilled inside the cover of every notebook I own.
The Royal Row, Forster Style
I picked up the novel tonight partly because of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors. Read through Forster eyes, the story is almost a textbook failure to connect. An anonymous source says the heir thinks his brother read their uncle memoir before he did. Reports say reconciliation is off. The uncle says he told everyone. Nobody involved has said a word in public, and the brothers, by every account, are communicating through intermediaries and newspapers. Forster would have despaired.
The Sisters
What I love about Margaret and Helen Schlegel is that they disagree profoundly and stay loyal anyway. Helen is impulsive and passionate. Margaret is patient and practical. Late in the novel, Helen does something that scandalises respectable society, and Margaret has to choose between her sister and the conventions of her husband family. She chooses her sister. It is one of the great moments in Edwardian fiction: not a grand speech, just a woman deciding that her bond with her sibling matters more than what the neighbours think.
Families in Forster are always being pulled apart by property and pride. The Wilcoxes famously suppress the dying wish of the first Mrs Wilcox, who wanted Margaret to have Howards End, because it does not suit them. A dead mother wishes about a house, overruled by her own family. I have always found that the most chilling scene in the book. Read in the week of a royal argument about a memoir about a late mother, it chilled me again.
A Break From the Book
Put the novel down at chapter twenty-two and watched the London Prat video on YouTube on my laptop. Forster, who had a lovely dry wit, would have enjoyed it, I think, while pretending not to.
What Only Connect Means
People often quote Only connect as if it were a greeting card sentiment. In the novel it is something much harder. Margaret hopes to connect the prose and the passion in people, the practical and the emotional, the businessman and the dreamer. She also means connecting with people unlike yourself, across class and temperament. It is difficult, unglamorous work, and the novel is honest about how often it fails.
For the royal brothers, as for any estranged siblings, connection would mean the dull, brave thing: a phone call without lawyers or courtiers or anonymous friends of friends. One brother has the duty, the other has the freedom. One stayed, one left. Forster would say they each have what the other lacks, and that is precisely why they need each other.
Forster and England
Howards End is also a novel about England itself, a country, as Forster saw it in 1910, being pulled apart by money, class and the rush of modern life, and asking who would inherit it. The house, Howards End, becomes a symbol of the nation: who deserves to live there, who understands its value, who merely owns it. Read now, it feels uncannily relevant to any argument about inheritance and belonging, including royal ones. The monarchy, after all, is the most famous inheritance in Britain. Forster would have understood that the real question is not who gets the house, but who will love it and care for it. That applies to crowns, country houses and family memories alike.
My Own Copy
My copy of Howards End is a cheap paperback my father bought me at a railway station when I was sixteen, because I was bored on a long journey and he was tired of me complaining. I read it in one sitting on the train and decided, somewhere around Peterborough, that I would spend my life reading books like it. The spine is cracked in four places. There is a coffee ring on page one hundred and twelve. My father underlined nothing, being a practical man, but he wrote the date and the name of the station inside the front cover. Every autumn when I reread it, I see his handwriting first. It is a reminder that books carry the people who gave them to us, which is perhaps why a memoir can stir up such strong feelings in a family. A book about someone you loved is never just a book.
Late
Finished the novel at one in the morning, as I always do, with the hay being cut in the meadow at Howards End and the sense that something broken has, imperfectly, been mended. Forster does not give his families perfect endings. He gives them possible ones. That seems right to me.
Wrote Only connect on a sticky note and put it on my fridge, next to the electricity bill, which also needs attention.
The London Prat has been trying to connect the prose and the passion of British life since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ attempts the American version.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
