"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

If we are correct in identifying Bernard as a kind of doppelganger to Forster, the latter set the precedent for such a gesture by writing characters reminiscent of Virginia Stephen and her sisters into his early novels. Indeed, the Schlegel menage - two young women independently managing the family resources and directing the education of their younger brother - seems to be directly modeled on the Stephen household after Leslie's death. Clearly the freedoms engendered by the Stephen circle inspired Forster to present them as viable alternatives to more accepted social practices. In fact, Forster proffered a more ironic assessment of the Cambridge experience, as one who had had it himself, in his portrayal of the solipsistic, hedonistic Tibby Schlegel (cf. Thoby Stephen, Virginia's older brother who is usually seen as the model for Percival) in Howards End.

It is apparent that both Forster and Woolf coveted certain qualities of the other's life, and that they enunciated in their novels many of the social concerns that preoccupied the other. Forster, for example, felt constrained from creating overtly homosexual characters. Maurice was, of course, not published until after his death, and the erotic dimensions in the relationships between characters of the same sex (as, for example, between Aziz and Fielding in A Passage to India) were veiled. On the other hand, Woolf, through the persona of Neville (usually thought to be based on Lytton Strachey), was able to place a homosexual character into a normal, rather than an exceptional or ostracized life.

In a similar paradox, Forster dealt with a series of feminist issues in Howards End long before they became a central subject of Woolf's writing. In that novel Forster obliquely and ironically raises the abiding issue of primogeniture, even though the Englishwoman's right to own and bequeath property had been established by law more than three decades earlier. After exposing the family's collusion in dismissing the first Mrs. Wilcox's deathbed legacy as worthless writing on a piece of disposable paper, Forster delivers his own poetic justice by assuring Margaret's final ownership of the house. He also champions the right of a single mother to bear and raise her (illegitimate) child on English soil in a state of moral impunity. Helen feels guilt not over her sexual impropriety but over the fact that she has taken advantage of someone from another, less protected class. Furthermore, she states at the end that she does not wish to be married to anyone. Forster also exposes the Wilcoxes' sexual double standard, and punishes the family by stripping it of its public powers. In addition, in the character of Margaret Schlegel he heroicizes a woman who is neither young nor strikingly attractive nor likely to bear children (she states her desire not to have children), and he aligns his narrative voice and his most perspicacious insights with hers. With the exception of Jacky Bast, Forster's female characters of 1910 fare better than Woolf's of 1931.(8)