Although most critics agree that Howards End (1910) is a less perfect novel than A Passage to India (1924), it is, in its own right, spontaneous and vigorous and more confidently authoritative. Even adverse criticism of Howards End has tended to recognize it as “the most ambitious as well as the most explicit of the novels.” Possibly because Forster had not brooded excessively over his materials and because the Great War had not yet accentuated his latent pessimism, Howards End has the force deriving from a poised and fundamentally positive view of life.
If Howards End lacks the fully mature artistry of A Passage to India, it is largely free from the negative effects upon Forster's art of his later skepticism—a disturbing austerity verging upon spiritual fatigue, and an almost excessive distancing of the writer from his characters verging upon indifference to them. In Howards End the Schlegel sisters are involved in emotionally more central situations than are Fielding, Aziz, and Adela Quested, and they are themselves warmer, more impulsive, and more genial. In some ways their perplexities and valuations of experience—reflecting their life in the now spiritually removed period of prosperous Edwardian England—are indeed remote. Yet Helen and Margaret Schlegel, through their sensitivity, conscientiousness, and moral complexity, achieve at times a depth and spaciousness transcending the somewhat limited universe prescribed for their activity and warrant a continued concern with the novel. Forster has also conceived their friends, acquaintances, relatives, and antagonists, for the most part, with vigor, with understanding, and with sympathy.