The Role of the Essayist-Commentator in Howards End

Abstract

Were Henry James to have a celestial tea party, inviting Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster, no doubt, as James himself might say, contradiction would grow ‘young again over tea cups and cigars’.¹ One can imagine the restless spoons if the conversation turned to the role of the narrator in the novel. James, of course, would advocate viewing the actions of the story through a central intelligence, whose perspective would rule out the possibility of even an occasional authorial intrusion. Jane Austen and George Eliot would talk sense, Austen sympathizing with Eliot’s need to establish, through authorial comment, norms against which her characters could be measured, and confessing that she too occasionally resorts to this tactic, though not nearly as often nor as extensively as Eliot. Miss Brontë might wait half the afternoon for Conrad to arrive, to ask whether her multiple and unreliable narrators in Wuthering Heights inspired techniques in his own fiction. Conrad, however, would not show up, preferring to hear about such parties second hand. Sterne would wait for Thackeray to reconsider his words against Tristram Shandy, and to realize how much the intrusive narrator of Vanity Fair has in common with Tristram.²