Two literary sisters, a family of hard-headed businessmen, a clerk who reads to better himself, and a house in Hertfordshire that will go to whoever the dead woman meant it for. Forster's father died when he was a baby and a great-aunt's legacy paid for the freedom he writes about; only connect, the book says, and then it spends four hundred pages showing exactly how much that costs. Fifty-nine plates by painters from Constable to Orpen trace the English house and garden, the cricket match and the field marshal, the whole settled order Forster's novel puts on trial.
Two literary sisters, a family of hard-headed businessmen, a clerk who reads to better himself, and a house in Hertfordshire that will go to whoever the dead woman meant it for. Forster's father died when he was a baby and a great-aunt's legacy paid for the freedom he writes about; only connect, ...