How Howards End drew on Tess of the D’Urbervilles
A documented line of influence: E.M. Forster demonstrably engaged Thomas Hardy’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Howards End
E.M. Forster · 1910
ModernRelevance
6/10
On Howards End’s page
- Howards End owes its pastoral conscience to Hardy. Forster followed Hardy in trying to bring 'the poetic possibilities of the country into the novel'; the house and its land carry the same elegiac sense of a vanishing rural England that Hardy gave Wessex.
- Forster's own criticism shows the debt: in Aspects of the Novel he faulted Hardy for ordering characters 'to acquiesce' to plot but made Tess the exception, 'greater than destiny' — proof Hardy's tragedy was live for him.
On Tess of the D’Urbervilles’s page
- Hardy gave Forster the model for bringing the poetic charge of the English countryside into the novel. Howards End — the farmhouse, the wych-elm, the land that 'feels ours' against the encroaching commercial sprawl — follows Hardy's quest to make rural England carry myth and meaning.
- Forster singled out Tess herself in Aspects of the Novel as the one Hardy character who 'conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny,' the exception to his complaint that Hardy bent his people to the plot. Tess stayed with him.