It would be easy for us — over-stretched target-driven bio-technicians that we seem to be becoming — to dismiss EM Forster and his novels as irrelevant anachronisms. The man himself was a rather prissy mummy’s boy, a closet homosexual, wracked with self-doubt; a timid acolyte on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. Yet he was, and remains, one of the most perceptive and meticulous cartographers of the inner life, and his 1910 novel Howards End is, dare we but heed it, a powerful warning not to throw out the baby of humanity with the bathwater of science.
The novel chronicles the entanglements of the passionately Bohemian Schlegel sisters — brisk Margaret and giddy Helen — with the prosaic Wilcoxes, a tribe of hard-nosed capitalists, …