SOURCE: Hoffman, Michael J., and Ann Ter Haar. “‘Whose Books Once Influenced Mine’: The Relationship between E. M. Forster's Howards End and Virginia Woolf's The Waves.” Twentieth Century Literature 45, no. 1 (spring 1999): 46-64.

In the following essay, Hoffman and Haar explore parallels between Howards End and Woolf's The Waves.

In a letter to Ethel Smyth on 21 Sept. 1930, Virginia Woolf spoke of her friend Morgan Forster as “E. M. Forster the novelist, whose books once influenced mine, and are very good, I think, though impeded, shrivelled and immature” (Letters 4: 218). In earlier letters Woolf had often alluded to Forster's influence, even insisting on one occasion that “I always feel that nobody, except perhaps Morgan Forster, lays hold of the thing I have done” (14 June 1925; Letters 3: 188). By 1930 this literary friendship had continued for more than two decades and was characterized by the kind of edginess that often marks the relationships of highly...