Howards End: Authoritative Text, Textual Appendix, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism

The text is that of the first English edition (1910), published by Edward Arnold. It is accompanied by textual annotations and a textual appendix.

"Backgrounds and Sources" presents a rich selection of Forster’s previously unpublished journals and letters and his working notes, which bring readers into the long and painstaking creative process that culminated in Howards End.

"Criticism" presents a superb selection of critical writing about the novel.

The critics include Edward Garnett, A. C. Benson, Katherine Mansfield, Frieda Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, and six interpretations by Wilfred Stone, Barbara Rosecrance, Perry Meisel, Kenneth Graham, Elizabeth Langland, and Fredric Jameson.

A debate on the successes and shortcomings of cinematic adaptation is presented through "Reviews of the Merchant-Ivory Film."

E. M. Forster was one of the major novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1879 and educated at Cambridge. His other novels include A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. He died in 1970.

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English and former Dean of the College at Brown University. He was previously a professor and a dean at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has also taught at the University of Copenhagen, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Virginia, and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. He is the author of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art; Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form; Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation; The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford; and The Phenomenology of Henry James. He is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of E. M. Forster’s Howards End and of the fourth and fifth Norton Critical Editions of Heart of Darkness.