SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘Only Connecting’ with the Family: Class, Culture, and Narrative Therapy in E. M. Forster's Howards End.” Style 31, no. 2 (summer 1997): 255-69.

In the following essay, Womack examines Forster's social criticism regarding family issues in Howards End.

Although David Lodge's Nice Work (1988) provides a surprising narrative of reconciliation between the academy and industry, its concluding pages allude to an even more pervasive cultural dilemma that has haunted English life for centuries—the mostly silent war that rages unchecked between the classes. Robyn Penrose, the novel's academic protagonist, recognizes the acuity of class and cultural distance that separates her students from a young black gardener tending the campus lawn. “The gardener is about the same age as the students,” Lodge writes, “but no communication takes place between them—no nods, or smiles, or spoken words, not even a glance. … Physically contiguous,” Lodge continues, “they inhabit separate worlds. It...