No one could have predicted the catastrophic outcome of Helen Schlegel’s first visit to Howards End.She falls in love with the refreshing Wilcox family, which cares not at all for Literature or Art, and impetuously becomes engaged to Paul Wilcox. Whole worlds – Schlegel culture and Wilcox commerce, liberalism and imperialism, green fields and motor cars, conversation and action – come together and collide in E.M. Forster’s novel. Set in upper-middle-class Edwardian England, it none the less explores lives that feel familiar in their tragic inability to ‘connect… the prose and the passion’.