SOURCE: Meisel, Perry. “Howards End: Private Worlds and Public Languages.” In The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850, pp. 166-82. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Meisel explores the influence of major writings and thoughts of the Bloomsbury group on the themes in Howards End.

The senior Forster's Howards End recapitulates the myth of the modern at the level of story while simultaneously putting it into question at the level of narration. The manifest thematic that leads Forster, quite ironically, to ask that we “Only connect” in the book's epigraph turns out to be evacuated by the conspicuous connections systematically demonstrated by the behavior of its language, especially those between the supposedly sundered realms of the private and the public. Like The Mayor of Casterbridge, Howards End has a calculating myth of the modern that is the wittingly defensive...