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History
The place that E. M. Forster loved so deeply that he made it the centerpiece of one of his best-loved novels was a country house just north of London called Rooksnest. From the moment he moved in with his mother at age four, “I took it to my heart and hoped . . . that I would live and die there.� Much more than just a house, for Forster, Rooksnest came to represent English country values—a connection to place, a respect for individuality, and a commitment to the contemplative life—that were increasingly threatened by the urbanization and industrialization sweeping Edwardian England. Forster’s childhood idyll was to last only ten years, for at fourteen he moved with his mother to the newly fashionable bourgeois suburb of Tonbridge Wells, home to many members of the growing business class that would become a central concern of his fiction.


Rooksnest in Hertfordshire, Forster's childhood home from 1883 to 1893.

In Tonbridge Wells, Forster met families who, like the Wilcoxes of Howards End, were energetic capitalists focused on motorcars and moneymaking. And if Tonbridge Wells gave rise to the Wilcoxes, Cambridge was the likely birthplace of the other central family of Howards End, the Schlegels. It was as a university student at King’s College that Forster was first inspired by the liberal humanism of philosopher George Moore, who advocated the contemplation of beauty and the cultivation of personal relations as a spiritual antidote to the rootless, mechanistic ethos of his age. Forster, together with the young men who would later form the Bloomsbury group of writers (Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, among others), embraced this challenge to traditional religious morality and to the growing commercial spirit of the time. Forster spent some of his happiest days in this company, a lifestyle mirrored in the Schlegels� passion for art, friendship, and the life of the mind.

Yet, like the Schlegel sisters, he was not completely satisfied by life among the London literati. More importantly, he was starting to understand the practicality of conformist values, of “social conventions, economic trend, efficiency,� and he grew acutely aware of the limitations of liberal ideals. The Bloomsbury group’s sitting-room debates and fashionable walking-parties were for Forster too narrow, too disdainful of the economic and material conditions that made their way of life possible. Against this backdrop, the character of Margaret emerged—her curious attraction to Henry, her appreciation of money, her pragmatism. Unlike her sister Helen, whose brief entrancement with the dynamic Wilcox men quickly evolves into contempt for them, Margaret, like the man who created her, envisions a marriage of soul and body, country and city, passion and prose, culture and commerce.

While Forster created the Wilcox and Schlegel families and the England they inhabit from his own experiences, the interior lives of Leonard Bast and Jacky were drawn purely from imagination. Leonard, a poor insurance clerk only a few steps removed from his rural, working-class roots, hopes to “come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.� To Forster, who believed that “the character of the English is essentially middle-class,� it was people like Leonard and the Wilcoxes—aspiring to wealth, political power, and culture—who would eventually “inherit� England, not the dying aristocratic class of the Schlegels nor the working classes. Forster used Leonard’s connection with the Schlegels as the social conscience of the book.

Because Forster did not keep comprehensive journals during his most fertile period as a writer and later destroyed some of his diaries, it is not possible to trace the entire composition of Howards End. It is known that the outline for the book crystallized sometime in 1908, about two years after Forster made a trip to the countryside to spend time with the Postens, an oddly matched stockbroker and his clever, cultured second wife who provided the immediate model for the relationship between Henry and Margaret. In a journal entry of February 1910, Forster wrote, “Am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death—the latter is truly an ally of the personal against the mechanical.� Clearly, the advancing machine age was at the forefront of Forster’s consciousness at the time. With the social issues of man versus machine, country versus city, and culture versus money weighing on his mind, Forster completed this, his fourth novel.

Over the years, Howards End has remained one of Forster’s most beloved novels. Few works combine social comedy and political commentary with the skillful characterizations seen in the Schlegel sisters. Writing during a time of lively discussion about his country’s socioeconomic conditions, Forster conceived the work as a “condition-of-England novel,� a work designed to enter Edwardian debates about wealth and poverty, art and pragmatism, country life and urban sprawl that would not have sounded unfamiliar in Thatcher’s England or Reagan’s America. Forster, with a comic suspicion of the dogmas championed by liberals and conservatives alike, provides a distinctly humanistic perspective on some of the central debates of his time and ours.

Ultimately, Howards End is the most optimistic expression of Forster’s unique vision, a sensibility that transcends the temporal confines of his novel. Its richly drawn characters and the struggles they face—to maintain human connection in an increasingly depersonalized society, to find a spiritual home in the world—are still as current as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.

(Critical) Reception
Published in November 1910, Howards End was greeted with glorious reviews, making Forster a literary star.

Adaptations

Theatre
A stage adaptation by Lance Sieveking and Cottrell, was performed in 1967 on tour and at the New Theatre in London, with Gwen Watford, Gemma Jones, Michael Goodliffe, Joyce Carey and Andrew Ray in the cast. Forster co-operated in the production.

Television
A British television adaptation of the novel in the BBC's Play of the Month series was broadcast in 1970, and starred Leo Genn, Sarah-Jane Gwillim, and Glenda Jackson.

Howards End (miniseries)
In November 2017, a four-part adaptation by Kenneth Lonergan was broadcast by the BBC. It was a co-production with US broadcaster Starz.[15][16]

Film
A film version made in 1992 stars Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, and Samuel West. Thompson won an Academy Award for her performance.

Radio
In 2009, a two-part adaptation by Amanda Dalton was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, with John Hurt as the narrator, Lisa Dillon as Margaret Schlegel, Jill Cardo as Helen Schlegel, Tom Ferguson as Tibby Schlegel, Alexandra Mathie as Aunt Juley, Malcolm Raeburn as Henry Wilcox, Ann Rye as Ruth Wilcox, and Joseph Kloska as Charles Wilcox.

Opera
Claudia Stevens' opera libretto Howards End, America (2016) moves the action to 1950s Boston. The adaptation is discussed in Stevens' article "Page to Stage: A New Opera, Howards End, America" in the

Sources
and including the picture.

Additional Reading:

Fascinating background material--thank you!