SOURCE: Sillars, Stuart. “Howards End and the Dislocation of Narrative.” In Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920, pp. 31-61. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Sillars examines Forster's allusions in Howards End to other texts of the Edwardian period in England to gain an understanding of the novel's “duality.”

In many ways, Forster's Howards End is the central text of the Edwardian years. I mean this not in the sense that it demonstrates values that are fundamental to the period—even though, as I shall later show, it addresses many of the age's main concerns—but rather in the sense that it demonstrates that duality of assertion and retreat, continuation and refusal, that I have claimed as the basic mode of so much writing of the time.

To call the structural principle at the heart of the novel a kind of irony would...