Howards End Themes

The message of Howards End is wrapped up in Margaret's mantra, "Only connect." What, you may ask, does this really mean? It's simple: love. This novel is all about love – all kinds of love: l...

Society makes nothing but trouble for the characters in Howards End. The notion that each of us is socially predestined for a certain kind of life based on who our parents are and how much money we...

Change is scary. And it's all around us in the world of Howards End, which, as you might imagine, makes said world kind of a scary place. It's funny – while a lot of the novel is concerned wi...

One of the main questions Howards End asks us to consider is this: how can an English person go about being an English person in the England that the novel shows us? That sounds a little crazy, so...

Nothing is more frustrating than seeing your own limitations and knowing that you can't get past them – and that's exactly what happens to some of the characters in Howards End. Dissatisfacti...

E.M. Forster offers up all kinds of diverse examples of English manhood in Howards End, and it's up to us to pass judgment on all of them. Some are ridiculous, some intimidating, and almost none of...

If you think it's hard to be a strong, independent woman today, imagine giving it a shot in 1910. The female protagonists of Howards End are constantly faced with social pressures, censure, and fru...

The brutal truth is, money matters. Howards End recognizes this horrible fact, though not all of its characters choose to admit it. The novel constantly demonstrates the need to balance ideals and...

Do you ever get yourself into situations where you know that you're making an argument that's going to come back and bit you in the you-know-where, but you do it anyway, just because you're too pro...

Written in 1910, Howards End is a classic pre-World War I text, and its setup of English-German tensions is practically a textbook example of the kinds of national anxieties that led to the war. Th...