Other Fiction Forster, E.M.: Howards End. v1. 08 Jan 09

[Dr. Drib]

There's an earlier version by Madam Broshkina also available here on MobileRead, at this location:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17995

My version contains em dashes, which I am now incorporating in all new ebook assemblies. I will also go back, as time permits, and redo all my earlier ebooks with em dashes.

Sony is currently offering a free copy of this title, but it uses double-spaces between paragraphs, which I personally dislike.

One thing you will find about the books here on MobileRead is that we assemble them by hand. This allows a personal touch to all the ebooks that are assembled here on MobileRead.

From Amazon, one critic writes about Howards End:

"Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

"Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

"Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly."

Like all the books I assemble on MobileRead, this too was assembled to reflect human intervention and artistic judgment.

I hope you enjoy it.

Don

[sakura-panda]

Thank you! I started off with the Sony version and then came looking for a copy here specifically because of all the spaces. This copy was much easier to read.