Howards End

I read E.M. Forster's Howards End on the plane on the way back from Singapore. It's probably the third time I've read it, though the last time would be thirty or so years ago and I had lost much of my sense of it.
I found it utterly engrossing. Ultimately because it is about democratization across a triple axis: as a political, a cultural, and as an ethical process and ideal. By which I mean it is about how egalitarianism is to be lived, socially and personally (and especially between men and women).
But it is also a social allegory in which two kinds of bourgeois styles are set against one another: that of the business world (the Wilcox's) and that of the aesthetic liberal intellectuals (so to say) (the Schlegels).
In the end the liberal intellectuals (Bloomsbury) wins, and in the end egalitarianism merely shores them up.
And it is also about London's relation to the rest of England in a period in which rural England was increasingly becoming a network of transport nodes (the motor car is important to this novel) and, in many counties, a leisure resource for London.
The wonderful final sentence brings together the novel's main concerns: Helen Schlegel, the most committed of the novel's liberal free spirits, pregnant with the bank clerk Lionel Bast's child, and who with her sister Margaret has managed to tame the millionaire businessman Wilcox, runs into the country house, Howard's End, excited about the new season's hay crop being harvested in the fields.
Not much hitherto has led us to think that Helen is interested in hay. Clearly her excitement expresses her motherhood to come. But more than that: it is a turn away from the struggle for equality and the fight for the soul of the bourgeoisie to the secular (in the oldest sense) rhythms of nature. A kind of retreat into the natural mundane.