There’s a definite feeling of him being a bit of a specimen in the novel, and Forster himself acknowledged this many years later - he felt that the Basts were his least successful creation in the novel. One conscious enhancement I tried to effect was that the Leonard Bast character seems, in the novel, almost as if he were the only working man in London, which of course is not the case. The novel gives you most of what you need to do that. I tried to read Howards End many times but failed earlier in life, and then I read it pretty closely when I was trying to decide whether or not to do the job.Īs an American, how did you go about understanding and parsing out the class system that is so central to the novel? They also do the period beautifully, and not just for beauty’s sake they don’t do anything to deliberately modernize it or bring it up to date or make it more accessible, and as a result, it’s all of those things. The film is just a perfect balance in that it’s very romantic, beautifully made, funny, interesting, substantial and surprising. I didn’t know the book very well and I hadn’t seen the movie, but I knew A Room With a View very, very well it’s one of my favorites. The nouveau-riche Wilcoxes, with a patriarch in Henry (Matthew McFadyn), gained their wealth by way of industry, while the poor clerk and friend of the Shlegels’, Leonard Bast (Joseph Quinn), lives hand-to-mouth.īefore the second episode, The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Lonergan about the adaptation’s commentary on colonialism, how he got a handle on the British class system and why he doesn’t like when writers modernize older works.Ĭolin Callender asked me if I wanted to write it. The upper-class Schlegels, headed up by 28-year-old Margaret (Hayley Atwell), spend their days discussing art and philosophy but can no longer afford the lease on their family home. The series tells the story of three families from disparate social classes whose lives intersect. In 2018, Howards End is being received for the turn-of-the-century social critique that it is - with the help of Lonergan, who elucidates and emphasizes the novel’s sociological material.

Who) and written by Kenneth Lonergan (the writer-director of Manchester by the Sea), this Howards End has been praised for its pared-down interpretation of the novel, the inclusivity of its casting and the time it takes - nearly four hours in total - developing the characters’ relationships.

Directed by Hettie Macdonald ( Fortitude, Dr.

The reaction has been quite different to the book’s latest adaptation, a four-part miniseries on Starz.

1910 novel by em forster