SOURCE: Kazin, Alfred. “Howards End Revisited.” Partisan Review 59, no. 1 (winter 1992): 29-43.

In the following essay, Kazin examines Howards End from the perspective of historical events of the later twentieth century.

Howards End appeared in 1910, a date that explains an idealism important to our understanding of the book. It was E. M. Forster's fourth novel. He had written in rapid succession Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908). Howards End was the last novel he was to publish for fourteen years. The next, A Passage to India (1924), was certainly worth waiting for, but it is not as serene and hopeful as Howards End. The “Great War,” the most influential event of the twentieth century and the onset of all our political woe, had intervened between Forster's two major novels and certainly darkened the second. The reality of British imperialism, bringing the threat...