You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Rip E.M Forster you'd have loved being an estate agent
My reading buddy Andrew suggested we enroll in the Catherine Project reading group for this book; he’s a big fan of Forster, and this is one of his favorite books.
While the book is firmly set in a place and time – Edwardian England (and I confess, I barely understand what that means, so I’ll back off my pretentions and call it pre-WWI 20th century England – it addresses several issues that are urgently relevant to the 2025 United States: What is our responsibility to the poor? How much of the past do we bring with us into the future, and how do we include it? And the key phrase: Only Connect: How do we balance commerce and art, or, as the Schlegel sisters put it, prose and passion?
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
While the book is firmly set in a place and time – Edwardian England (and I confess, I barely understand what that means, so I’ll back off my pretentions and call it pre-WWI 20th century England – it addresses several issues that are urgently relevant to the 2025 United States: What is our responsibility to the poor? How much of the past do we bring with us into the future, and how do we include it? And the key phrase: Only Connect: How do we balance commerce and art, or, as the Schlegel sisters put it, prose and passion?
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
My second Forster. Once again read the ebook from Project Gutenberg while listening to the audiobook on Storytel narrated by Colleen Prendergast.
In typical Forster fashion we are at once plunged into the thick of things from the first chapter. We are introduced to the Schlegel sisters - Margaret and Helen, their brother Tibby and their Aunt Juley. Margaret and Helen were very reminiscent of Eleanor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s influence is evident in both his books that I’ve read so far, A Room With A View and this one. Although Howard’s End and A Room With A View are similar in essence, the stories are different. There is however the familiar quirky cast of characters, the incisive commentary on Edwardian society and the usual in-depth explorations into human behaviour. This is a longer book and it delves more deeply into what makes us tick as human beings. It excavates the human psyche, often ruthlessly but also with compassion to lay bare our innermost desires and motivations, and as always with Forster, it does this in exquisitely descriptive prose rich in humour, wit and irony.
The two sisters are not as different as Eleanor and Marianne, to begin with. They are both bohemian and independent minded - endlessly discussing and debating the Arts and their influence on humanity with their circle of like minded friend. They are privileged & pretentious, but self-aware enough to be genuinely empathetic and willing to help those less fortunate. They share a close bond that helps them navigate all the chaos and messiness that life throws at them with grace (mostly Margaret), resilience (Margaret and Helen) and sometimes indifference (mostly Tibby). The Wilcoxes are a wealthy family, seemingly perfect with undercurrents of dysfunction. Howard’s End belongs to Mrs. Wilcox and although she’s a very simple, vague sort of woman, her passion for the house is very deeply real. Henry Wilcox, her husband, is an astute businessman, pompous, practical to a fault, repressed and very much a product of his times. He can be considerate when it suits him but is primarily a master manipulator. The Basts, husband and wife, are the wretchedly poor couple that the Schlegel sisters are determined to help. Leonard Bast is an idealistic, romantic sort of man, who tries desperately to improve his circumstances through exposure to the Arts. He reads diligently, attends music concerts and the theatre in an attempt to educate himself and gain the respectability he so fiercely desires. His wife Jacky is the exact opposite. Indolent, nagging and insecure, with a shady past, she is incapable of helping herself or supporting her husband.
It is quite the explosive mix of characters and makes for a turbulent, tumultuous story! Forster is not afraid of making sudden dramatic twists and turns to his storyline and there are more than a few surprises here, good, bad and ugly. There were times when I felt I was reading a thriller and couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next! Forster underscores the grey areas of human interaction with his usual brilliance. Compassion, sacrifice, grief, forgiveness, love, and friendship are all examined in detail and presented for our contemplation. The ending is raw yet believable, but my modern sensibilities rebelled at some parts of it. I understood but didn’t necessarily like. Forgiveness comes hard to me, even in fiction 🤷🏼♀️ This combined with the rather pretentious discussions that the sisters indulge in on music, literature and politics in the initial chapters, are the reason I gave this 4.5 instead of 5 ⭐️
I watched the movie immediately after. Like A Room With A View, this too is a Merchant-Ivory production with a superlative cast and brilliant performances. I wonder if Emma Thompson had premonitions of writing Sense & Sensibility and playing Eleanor later in life when she essayed her Oscar-winning role as Margaret in this film?! Helena Bonham Carter is a perfect Helen. Her nuanced portrayal of a sensitive, independent woman is brilliant. But for me, the definitive performance is Sir Anthony Hopkins as Henry Wilcox. He is pitch perfect as the pompous, pretentious man with an occasionally tender heart, who when push comes to shove, can do the right thing! He should have won an Oscar too me thinks!
This was a more serious work than A Room With A View. There is greed, grief, tragedy and manipulation but there is also courage, determination, tenderness, passion and joy. Forster has become a favourite and I now want to read everything he’s written. Where Angels Fear to Tread, his debut novel will be next.
In typical Forster fashion we are at once plunged into the thick of things from the first chapter. We are introduced to the Schlegel sisters - Margaret and Helen, their brother Tibby and their Aunt Juley. Margaret and Helen were very reminiscent of Eleanor and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. Austen’s influence is evident in both his books that I’ve read so far, A Room With A View and this one. Although Howard’s End and A Room With A View are similar in essence, the stories are different. There is however the familiar quirky cast of characters, the incisive commentary on Edwardian society and the usual in-depth explorations into human behaviour. This is a longer book and it delves more deeply into what makes us tick as human beings. It excavates the human psyche, often ruthlessly but also with compassion to lay bare our innermost desires and motivations, and as always with Forster, it does this in exquisitely descriptive prose rich in humour, wit and irony.
The two sisters are not as different as Eleanor and Marianne, to begin with. They are both bohemian and independent minded - endlessly discussing and debating the Arts and their influence on humanity with their circle of like minded friend. They are privileged & pretentious, but self-aware enough to be genuinely empathetic and willing to help those less fortunate. They share a close bond that helps them navigate all the chaos and messiness that life throws at them with grace (mostly Margaret), resilience (Margaret and Helen) and sometimes indifference (mostly Tibby). The Wilcoxes are a wealthy family, seemingly perfect with undercurrents of dysfunction. Howard’s End belongs to Mrs. Wilcox and although she’s a very simple, vague sort of woman, her passion for the house is very deeply real. Henry Wilcox, her husband, is an astute businessman, pompous, practical to a fault, repressed and very much a product of his times. He can be considerate when it suits him but is primarily a master manipulator. The Basts, husband and wife, are the wretchedly poor couple that the Schlegel sisters are determined to help. Leonard Bast is an idealistic, romantic sort of man, who tries desperately to improve his circumstances through exposure to the Arts. He reads diligently, attends music concerts and the theatre in an attempt to educate himself and gain the respectability he so fiercely desires. His wife Jacky is the exact opposite. Indolent, nagging and insecure, with a shady past, she is incapable of helping herself or supporting her husband.
It is quite the explosive mix of characters and makes for a turbulent, tumultuous story! Forster is not afraid of making sudden dramatic twists and turns to his storyline and there are more than a few surprises here, good, bad and ugly. There were times when I felt I was reading a thriller and couldn’t wait to find out what would happen next! Forster underscores the grey areas of human interaction with his usual brilliance. Compassion, sacrifice, grief, forgiveness, love, and friendship are all examined in detail and presented for our contemplation. The ending is raw yet believable, but my modern sensibilities rebelled at some parts of it. I understood but didn’t necessarily like. Forgiveness comes hard to me, even in fiction 🤷🏼♀️ This combined with the rather pretentious discussions that the sisters indulge in on music, literature and politics in the initial chapters, are the reason I gave this 4.5 instead of 5 ⭐️
I watched the movie immediately after. Like A Room With A View, this too is a Merchant-Ivory production with a superlative cast and brilliant performances. I wonder if Emma Thompson had premonitions of writing Sense & Sensibility and playing Eleanor later in life when she essayed her Oscar-winning role as Margaret in this film?! Helena Bonham Carter is a perfect Helen. Her nuanced portrayal of a sensitive, independent woman is brilliant. But for me, the definitive performance is Sir Anthony Hopkins as Henry Wilcox. He is pitch perfect as the pompous, pretentious man with an occasionally tender heart, who when push comes to shove, can do the right thing! He should have won an Oscar too me thinks!
This was a more serious work than A Room With A View. There is greed, grief, tragedy and manipulation but there is also courage, determination, tenderness, passion and joy. Forster has become a favourite and I now want to read everything he’s written. Where Angels Fear to Tread, his debut novel will be next.
medium-paced
"England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?"
Second time's the charm. Despite loving the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of the novel, I found the text a bit dry to sustain my attention. Putting it aside for a few months changed that completely, and it made me realise Forster's mastery. Like all narratives, it must be situated in its time. Forster, while showing sympathy for the working classes of the imperial metropole in the form of Mr Bast, completely sidesteps the imperial networks of exploitation through which the Wilcox fortune is made.
That aside, its place in the canon is well deserved. The novel's treatment of class in Edwardian Britain, the sweeping tides of industrialisation, and the Schlegel sisters is something to be cherished.
Second time's the charm. Despite loving the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of the novel, I found the text a bit dry to sustain my attention. Putting it aside for a few months changed that completely, and it made me realise Forster's mastery. Like all narratives, it must be situated in its time. Forster, while showing sympathy for the working classes of the imperial metropole in the form of Mr Bast, completely sidesteps the imperial networks of exploitation through which the Wilcox fortune is made.
That aside, its place in the canon is well deserved. The novel's treatment of class in Edwardian Britain, the sweeping tides of industrialisation, and the Schlegel sisters is something to be cherished.
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Surprised by this one, mainly because I found the first 1/3 of the book not the way I expected it and I wanted to drop it but if you remove that 1/3 the other 2/3 of the book was entertaining, interesting, beautiful at times, well written and enjoyable to me.
The good parts:
The way he described nature in some points was just beautiful, the way he described the sea, the mountains, the sky, the green fields and oh even the music was fascinating. I fell in love with the scenery he was describing.
His characters were also interesting, almost all of them, if you remove the character he used as his main portrayal of working class all the others represented their social classes very accurately in different ways.
The main romantic story is definitely not for everyone but it was perfect to me, the match between those 2 made perfect sense if you paid attention to their characters! Both of them decided to go with their relationship which was nothing but calculative at the beginning with the potential of ending up loving each other and it just made so much sense for them!! Bonus points because the ending didn’t ruin it which is very important and I would even say that I loved the way the story finished.
His characters were also interesting, almost all of them, if you remove the character he used as his main portrayal of working class all the others represented their social classes very accurately in different ways.
The main romantic story is definitely not for everyone but it was perfect to me, the match between those 2 made perfect sense if you paid attention to their characters! Both of them decided to go with their relationship which was nothing but calculative at the beginning with the potential of ending up loving each other and it just made so much sense for them!! Bonus points because the ending didn’t ruin it which is very important and I would even say that I loved the way the story finished.
The bad parts:
Besides finding the beginning not to my I liking, I will also add the 3 other negatives. The one of those 3 being the weird contradicting sexism, he was pointing out some things that women do and have in their nature and the thing is that his female characters were all different and they wouldn't act the same way in anything. The woman nature he was pointing out after a specific female character of his talked, most of his other female characters didn’t had it in them, he was contradicting himself constantly regarding this.
Second issue was that he was messing the dates up and some events and I was surprised that none corrected it before publishing it.
Third is that the book has as one of the main themes to be the differences between social classes and it was very clear that the man who wrote it grew up middle class/upper class and belonged to those as an adult because he was incapable of writing accurately or convincingly the working class, the way he portrayed the other two was accurate whatsoever, you can tell that a middle class/upper class socialist wrote it.
medium-paced
I must admit that I listened to this on the Libby app and probably missed most of the first half of the book. I don't think this is a good book to listen to unless you are not distracted.
I wasn't very engrossed in the book, even when was paying attention. Not much really happens with the characters expect the men being entitled and ignoring the women until they walk away. Anyway, not my type of book.
I wasn't very engrossed in the book, even when was paying attention. Not much really happens with the characters expect the men being entitled and ignoring the women until they walk away. Anyway, not my type of book.