How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant!How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
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What makes this masterpiece a pure delight for contemporary readers is its clear, vibrant portrait of life in Edwardian England, and the wonderful characters who inhabit the charming old country house in Hertfordshire called Howards End. This cozy house becomes the object of an inheritance dispute between the upright conservative Wilcox family and the Schlegel sisters, Helen and Margaret,sensitive and intuitive women loved by men willing to leap wide social barriers to fulfill their ardor. Through romantic entanglements,disappearing wills and sudden tragedy, the conflict over the house emerges as a symbolic struggle for England"s very future. Rich with the tradition,spirit and wit belonging only to the English. Howards End is a remarkable novel of rare insightand understanding, As in his celebrated A Passage to India, E, M. Forster brings to vivid life a country and an era through the destinies of his characters.