"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Michael J. Hoffman, Ann Ter Haar

When Forster asks the question, in Aspects of the Novel, "may the writer take the reader into his confidence about his characters?" he answers, "better not" (81). But any reader of Howards End soon realizes that Forster's narrative voice never hesitates to tell us about the characters, even though that voice is more explicit in making generalizations about character than in giving away secrets about the characters. Here is an area in which the two writers' practices ostensibly clashed, with Woolf attempting either to transmute the narrative voice or do away with it entirely in the Jamesian spirit of dramatizing or rendering. In reality, however, Woolf found other ways to get her comments into the text - for instance, by using one character's voice to describe another character, and by dramatically giving that commenting character a prominence in the narrative that establishes his or her authority (for example, Bernard in The Waves).

Literary history has situated Forster and Woolf as part of a community known as "Bloomsbury," often neglecting the nuanced differences in their family backgrounds. Even though most of Forster's contemporaries among the British artists and intelligentsia came from a milieu that resembled that of the Schlegel sisters, his own familial roots were Wilcoxian: property, politics, business. He spent his boyhood (1883-93) on a small country estate called Rooksnest in Stevenage, a home not unlike Howards End. It is no doubt the Wilcox in Forster that seeks to identify an essentially English art, an aesthetics that arises from an English mythology. One can trace a British chauvinism in both his aesthetic and political manifestoes as well as in his desire to compete with such French and Russian masters as Proust and Tolstoy.(6) Forster chose to live in a country town (Weybridge) and a country village (Abinger) consistent with his more rural family roots. Woolf, the consummate city dweller (like the Schlegel sisters whom they resemble, Virginia and Vanessa were natives of London), later took refuge with Leonard in rural Sussex to escape the demands of London literary and political life. Their country home, Monk's House, Rodmell is another dwelling reminiscent of both Howards End and Rooksnest.

There can hardly be two novels that seem more explicitly opposite than Howards End and The Waves. The first clearly finds its affinities in the long realist tradition of the British social novel, with its concerns about class, marriage, and property. Howards End is full of houses; it presents the rich and the poor; it divides the middle class into lovers of property and lovers of the arts; it has three marriages, at least one marriage plot, two infidelities, and an illegitimate birth. These have been conventions of narrative fiction since Clarissa and Tom Jones. The Waves, on the other hand, is the quintessential "impressionist" novel, meant to be read with the care one brings to a lyric poem full of images, tropes, and archetypes; it moves not on the flow of plot and story line but on accumulated fragments from the lives of a variety of characters, all of whom speak but not all of whom control the discourse; its characters are not created psychologically through action and dialogue but through apercus and juxtaposition. The two books seem as though they were written out of totally different novelistic traditions, as to some extent they were.