![]() ![]() “Only connect” makes its entrance shortly after Margaret Schlegel, the novel’s liberal intellectual heroine, is first kissed by Henry Wilcox, the conservative businessman whom she has rather surprisingly agreed to marry. What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private-the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires. The epigraph to Howards End, the book he described with typical modesty as “my best novel and approaching a good novel,” seems to capture the leading idea of all his work-the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation. ![]() Forster is discussed, the phrase “only connect” is sure to come up sooner or later. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 180 pp., $24) ![]()
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