ABSTRACT
An interesting year to pick out of the hat; it was in 1910 that E.M. Forster, her least favourite author, published Howards End. The work centres on the relations between the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. The Schlegel family embodies the imagined values of the English gentry that had somehow survived the mercantile and Industrial Revolution. The Wilcoxes are the nouveau riche, not interested in a cultured life, and unconcerned with previous generations. Maggie Schlegel marries Henry Wilcox, a businessman who, interested in material wealth alone, exemplifies a radical new present. Some eleven years after Virginia Woolf's statement about human character, T. S. Eliot, in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets", addressed the same issue as Forster. Albert Camus belonged to the generation that followed Woolf. Although it experienced the aftermath of the Great War, it was destined, tragically, to repeat the same march to manic war-making that had marred her era.
