SOURCE: Langland, Elizabeth. “Gesturing Towards an Open Space: Gender, Form, and Language in Howards End.” In E. M. Forster, edited by Jeremy Tambling, pp. 81-99. London: Macmillan, 1995.

In the following essay, Langland explores sexual politics in Howards End, focusing on Forster's own homosexuality and admitted misogyny.

E. M. Forster is a difficult writer to approach because he appears simple. His work presents none of the stylistic resistance and technical virtuosity characteristic of his notable contemporaries like Joyce and Woolf. Further, he seems to have recourse to a nineteenth-century liberal humanism in resolving his novels, an emphasis that sets at naught the complexities of literary modernism.¹ So, at best, Forster claims a precarious stake in the twentieth-century canon. But Forster accomplished something difficult and important in his novel Howards End that a gendered politics of reading can uncover. In his personal embattlement with gender and his embattlement with patriarchal...