From Personal Issues to National Concerns: A Study in E.M Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread & Howards End

Abstract

            E.M. Forster (1879-1970) is one of the important novelists who dealt with the personal and social lives of the people in England during the early beginning of the twentieth century. During his literary career, he developed gradually his views about man and his position in society.

 In his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1902), the focus is laid on local and personal issues in the lives of the characters. It is limited to the relations between neighbours in small communities. Though the setting is shifted to Italy, Forster does not make full use of this shift to present cultural or racial conflicts; rather he limits his plot to the private troubles of some characters that have no wider interest in life. His characters are isolated from the larger currents of the social and political life, preoccupied with some personal problems that take all their time and energies. But Howards End (1910) shows a clear and important shift from the limited affairs of daily life to the more general and crucial affairs that concern the whole society. He deals with the political and economic issues which were very important in England at that time.