Howards End

• Middlemarch by George Eliot. Howards End built on it. - _Howards End_ is the early-twentieth-century heir to Eliot's _Middlemarch_. Critics reach for the comparison first: the same authoritative narrator persuading you about how people work, the same panoramic ambition to take the measure of England. - The novel's central crux — who rightfully inherits the house — runs on a suppressed deathbed bequest, the will-and-inheritance plot Eliot perfected; Forster makes the destroyed scrap of paper the moral hinge of the whole book. - Where Eliot anatomized provincial life, Forster anatomizes the Edwardian classes; the country-house tradition the title invokes runs straight back through Eliot.
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Howards End built on it. - _Howards End_ owes its pastoral conscience to Hardy. Forster followed Hardy in trying to bring 'the poetic possibilities of the country into the novel'; the house and its land carry the same elegiac sense of a vanishing rural England that Hardy gave Wessex. - Forster's own criticism shows the debt: in _Aspects of the Novel_ he faulted Hardy for ordering characters 'to acquiesce' to plot but made Tess the exception, 'greater than destiny' — proof Hardy's tragedy was live for him.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Howards End built on it. - _Howards End_ descends from Austen's novel of manners — the genre Forster updates here. He used the free indirect discourse and the ironic, norm-setting narrator he openly admired in Austen to expose the gap between his characters' self-image and their conduct. - Critics call Forster the truest claimant to be Austen's spiritual heir; the contrasted-sisters pairing at the novel's moral center belongs to the Austen tradition this book carries forward.

Also adapted: The Inheritance (2018, stage)

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