'In no book', Forster once said in an interview, 'have I got more down than the people I like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me.' Despite this modest assessment of his work, Forster remains one of the most admired English novelists of the 20th century and a brilliantly perceptive guide to the kind of emotional reticence and awkwardness so often seen as typically English. His most famous novel is probably A Passage to India, a story of the unbridgeable gulf between Indians and English under the Raj, but Howards End is arguably his most characteristic and successful work. The novel focuses on the complicated relationship between two families - the cultured and idealistic Schlegels and the more materialistic Wilcoxes. The Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, both respond admiringly to the apparent practicality of the Wilcoxes, father Henry and two sons, Paul and Charles. Helen is briefly engaged to Paul before she realizes that she cannot go through with the marriage. Later, after a subsequent estrangement between the two families ends, Margaret befriends Mrs. Wilcox, the owner of the country house Howards End, symbol of all that is good and enduring in the story. When Mrs. Wilcox dies, Margaret ultimately agrees to become Henry's second wife, unaware that he and Charles have conspired to deprive her of Howards End which Mrs. Wilcox bequeathed her in a note they have destroyed. Into this tangled web of deceit and ambivalent emotions steps Leonard Bast, a lower middleclass clerk with aspirations to better himself, who has a short and disastrous affair with Helen. The lives of many of the characters (the Schlegel sisters, Henry and Charles Wilcox, Leonard Bast) are changed and blighted by the events of the novel but the house itself, Howards End, survives as the means of finally uniting the different worlds they represent.

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