![]() ![]() ![]() A subplot charts the sisters’ patronising and ultimately tragic attempts to improve the intellect and fortunes of an impoverished insurance clerk, Leonard Bast. ![]() The novel chronicles the entanglements of the passionately Bohemian Schlegel sisters - brisk Margaret and giddy Helen - with the prosaic Wilcoxes, a tribe of hard-nosed capitalists, and their house, the eponymous Howards End. Yet he was, and remains, one of the most perceptive and meticulous cartographers of the inner life, and his 1910 novel Howards End is, dare we but heed it, a powerful warning not to throw out the baby of humanity with the bathwater of science. The man himself was a rather prissy mummy’s boy, a closet homosexual, wracked with self-doubt a timid acolyte on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. It would be easy for us - over-stretched target-driven bio-technicians that we seem to be becoming - to dismiss EM Forster and his novels as irrelevant anachronisms. ![]()
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