Dave's Book Blog: "Howards End" by E. M. Forster

This novel combines feather-light Jane Austen style drawing room comedy with a biting social commentary in a beautifully-paced plot which travels inexorably towards tragedy ... and a happy ending.

The Schlegels are two sisters and a brother of independent means whose essentially frivolous lives are redeemed by a clear understanding that they are privileged and that the underprivileged who support them lead lives of struggle. Sometimes clumsily, but always with the best intentions, they try to better the lot of the poor.

They interact with the Wilcoxes. Mr Wilcox is a businessman whose fortune comes from West Africa. As a self-made man he is convinced that those who have not made it are poor through their own failures. He uses and abuses the people who work for him and his son, George, does so even more. Only his wife, who is the old money owner of Howards End, is a spiritual Schlegel.

At first sight, it is difficult to see why Howards End is regarded as a classic. Written in 1910, with Modernism round the corner and Henry James already showing the way, it remains in its style resolutely Victorian, adopting a third-person omniscient point of view, in the past tense, with the author from time to time addressing the reader directly, a technique which, while it adds the suggestion of verisimilitude, as if this was a history rather than fiction, interrupts the narrative and distances the characters from the reader.

“I hope that it will not set the reader against her” (Ch 2)
“Our hero and heroine were married. They have weathered the storm and may reasonably expect peace.” (Ch 31)

Perhaps this old-fashioned elegance is what appeals to the bulk of today’s readers: it is certainly easier than Modernist fiction and there is a nostalgic cultural presupposition in England that the pinnacle of the novel is represented by Austen and the Brontes, Dickens and Eliot and even, God help us, the dreadful Trollope.

The plot is pretty Victorian too, driven by improbable coincidences, from the Wilcoxes moving to London to be neighbours with the Schlegels to Leonard’s wife playing a key role in the denouement. But the plot is not the point. It is clear that Forster started with his themes and then developed the understory, on which the plot is built, and the characters who are created from archetypes. But Forster’s skill lies in making the reader believe in the possibility of the story and the reality of the characters.

Forster himself, in his Aspects of the Novel, divided fictional characters into ‘rounded’ and ‘flat’: flat characters can be expressed in a single sentence, they never surprise the reader, and so they are memorable which means they never need reintroducing. On these criteria, Margaret and Henry and perhaps Leonard are the only fully-rounded characters.

But this doesn’t necessarily matter. Forster points out almost all Dickens characters are flat and they are memorable caricatures. For me, the test of a compelling character is whether the reader treats them as if they were real. In a discussion with my U3A English Novel group, I expressed surprise that Henry proposed to Margaret (and even more that she accepted him) and I was told that he proposed because he wanted to be looked after in his old age, that he had thought Evie his daughter would fulfil this role but that she had decided to get married and so he had proposed to Margaret, a much younger woman who could be expected to survive him. She, in turn, accepted him because she was afraid she would be left on the shelf. In other words, my fellow readers, all educated, well-read and cultured Schlegel types, believed sufficiently in these characters to treat them as real. Of course, Margaret and Henry are ‘rounded’ characters (and the fact that I found their marriage surprising proves this), but my fellow readers also believed in Jacky enough to construct her future after the end of the book: she would go back ‘on the game’ now that Leonard was dead.

My opinion, as an author, is that the characters dance to the themes of the book. Charles, for example, is a classic flat character. Even more narrow-minded than his father, he is created to be a representation of the unacceptable face of capitalism (as seen by Forster in its colonial and imperialist aspect), triumphant and unbridled, and, as such, to be the one who goes too far at the denouement; it is his downfall that provokes the ending. Helen’s role is to represent feeling unrestrained by reason (I wonder whether Forster was inspired to create Helen and Margaret from the Dashwood sisters Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility; Jane Austen was one of Forster’s favourite authors) and she does this both to kickstart the story and to enable the end.

The key characters are:

Margaret Schlegel: the principal protagonist. Despite being firmly on the side of feelings, art and culture, she recognises that these things are not possible without commerce, as when she defends her proposed marriage to Henry: “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No - perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.” (Ch 19)

Margaret is connection personified, “The rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.” (Ch 22) (This brings to mind Bifrost, the rainbow bridge between Asgard, home of the Gods, and Midgard, the human world, in Norse mythology. Near Howards End are the Six Hills “tombs of warriors, breasts of the spring”. Howards End and its original, Rooks Nest House, E M Forster’s childhood home, are in Hertfordshire close to the boundary between Wessex and the Danelaw, negotiated by Alfred the Great and Guthrun in c879. Of course the Germanic Schlegels and their Anglo-Saxon in-laws all come from cultures that once worshipped Odin/Wotan and his fellow gods. More connections?)

Her marriage to Henry, even after she has discovered that he has been unfaithful to Ruth, is prompted by a feeling that she can improve him: “Henry must have it as he liked, for she loved him, and some day she would use her love to make him a better man.” (Ch 28)

Henry Wilcox: Often portrayed as the villain, Henry is a fiendishly complex character. Yes, he’s a businessman making money out of England’s Empire and colonies. Yes, he’s a capitalist who “goes about saying that personal actions count for nothing, and there will always be rich and poor.” (Ch 30) Yes, he’s an archetypal member of the patriarchy, a hypocrite who sees no connection between himself making Jacky his mistress (excusable, “I am a man, and have lived a man’s past”; Ch 26) and Helen becoming pregnant (inexcusable). Nevertheless he marries and therefore connects with on some level the stewards of Howards End, first Ruth and then Margaret, and therefore he has some capacity to understand and appreciate the spiritual side of life. At Ruth’s funeral his thoughts show that he can at least glimpse Ruth in her Mother Nature role: “Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the gift of God. Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field.” (Ch 11)

But on the whole Henry deals with life by chopping it up into sections small enough for him to deal with, the way we eat a jacket potato. he compartmentalises things. He sees this as concentrating, as focussing. He deals with things in bits and that way he can cope with them. His love for Margaret cannot be allowed to interfere with his business interests.

He is a man of strong opinions who finds it difficult to admit that he is, or has done, wrong. He tells Helen that the firm Leonard works for is about to fail and disclaims responsibility after she persuades Leonard to change job, for a smaller wage, and his first firm stays solvent. Henry denies that the wych-elm has pig’s teeth embedded in it. And when he is exposed as a man who has had a mistress he very quickly gets on his high horse, accusing Margaret of arranging his exposure and refusing to give Leonard a job because he never responds to what he characterises as blackmail.

Leonard Bast is the sacrificial victim. He is a poor man, both in terms of money and cultural education. In another example of a disconnect causing unhappiness, he is ashamed of his roots (his family were agricultural labourers in Lincolnshire) and seeks to better himself by going to classical concerts, reading ‘improving’ books such as Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and decorating his basement flat with “one of the masterpieces of Maude Goodman” (Ch 6). The Schlegels half-heartedly try to befriend him although “he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.” Maude Goodman’s paintings are overly sentimental. Forster is snobbishly but sympathetically showing that Bast is culturally inadequate. Fundamentally Leonard has no agency and yet he is crucial to the resolution of the plot.

Helen Schlegel, Margaret’s younger sister, represents feeling uncontrolled by reason. She is impulsive and spontaneous. At the start of the book she has a one-night-engagement; near the end she has a one-night-stand. Her heart is always in the right place but she leaps before she looks and the consequences of her actions are rarely what she has intended.

Ruth Wilcox is a nebulous and mystic figure. Somehow she always knows what is going on but she finds practicalities such as buying Christmas presents difficult.

Tibby Schlegel: The personification of culture and intellectualism taken to the extreme, Tibby, the younger brother of Margaret and Helen, is effete and etiolated, frail and given to laziness. At the concert, he sits with the score on his knee. He lives entirely in the context of towns (London and Oxford) and even there suffers from hay-fever. Is he a self-portrait of the author?

Charles Wilcox: The Wilcox equivalent of Tibby: commerce at its worst. We first see him as entitled, privileged bully; almost his first statement is: “This station’s abominably organized; if I had my way, the whole lot of ‘em should get the sack.” (Ch 3) One of his trophies is a Dutch Bible which he presumably looted during the Boer War (Ch 18)

Jacky Bast: “It is simplest to say that she was not respectable.” (Ch 6) When she had lived in Cyprus she had been Henry’s mistress. At the start of the story she is living in sin with Leonard; later they marry.

Miss Avery: the crazy old caretaker of Howards End whose function is to ensure that it passes from Ruth Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel, despite having had a marriage proposal from Ruth’s brother.

The theme:
So what is the theme of this novel to which these characters dance? One needs to look no further than the epigraph: “Only connect”. But that is a little gnomic, to say the least. What does it mean? Forster explains it at two key moments. The first is just after the 50% mark when Margaret is trying to rationalise her decision to marry Henry (and this unlikely wedding is itself a symbol of the need to join the world of culture represented by the Schlegels with that of commerce represented by the Wilcoxes except for Ruth). Margaret thinks: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. ... Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” (Ch 22) The second, near the end, is more explicit. She is berating Henry for his hypocrisy: “You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress - I forgave you. My sister has a lover - you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel - oh, contemptible! - a man who insults his wife when she is alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins other women for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he’s not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognize them, because you cannot connect.” (Ch 38)

Connections are key, the most obvious one being that between Margaret and Henry which is between what Margaret calls “personal relations” and the “outer” life, which “seems the real one - there’s grit in it” (Ch 4). But there are multiple other connections and disconnections:

When Leonard first meets the Wilcoxes in the person of Evie and Mr W, she laughs at him as Margaret tells him “You tried to get away from the folks that are stifling us all - away past books and houses to the truth. You were looking for a real home” (a significant portion of this novel is about the search for a home; the Schlegels have lived in a house in London all there lives but the lease expires during the novel and they have to move out of it) nand he responds, angrily “I fail to see the connection.” (Ch 16) Leonard is desperately trying to connect with the world of high culture.
The Schlegel’s are half-German. Their father was a German who even fought in the Bismarckian wars (“against Denmark, Austria, France”) that turned Germany from a hodge-podge of tiny principalities into a unified nation; he then became disillusioned with the fruits of victory epitomised by “the smashed windows of the Tuileries” and “Pan-Germanism” which seems to be the English “Imperialism” in another flavour (Ch 4). The Schlegels therefore connect England with Europe in their very genes ; Margaret sees this as a connection between emotion and reason: “The Continent, for good or for evil, is interested in ideas” (Ch 9). The concert they and their German relatives attend in chapter 5 has both German and English music: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance.
A key theme is the idea that the world is endangered by this disconnect between modernity and nature. Creeping urbanisation even threatens Howards End: on the horizon there is a rust-red belt of housing which threatens to come ever closer. Charles is driving a motorcar when we first encounter him; when it makes a dust cloud which makes the villagers cough he muses: “I wonder when they'll learn wisdom and tar the roads.” (Ch 3) Forster seemed prescient about cars: “Month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew: leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through the dirt with an admired obscurity.” (Ch 13)
From the start of the book there is a disconnect between the Wilcoxes and nature, symbolised by the fact that Henry and Charles and Evie all have hayfever (as does Tibby, the younger brother of the Schlegel sisters, who is so disconnected from the natural world that he gets hayfever in London).
There is a disconnect between rich and poor. This is personified by the gulf in understanding between the Wilcox/Schlegels and the Basts, prefigured when Leonard is reading Ruskin and admiring his prose even when he is subconsciously aware that it doesn’t quite work. “The voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.” (Ch 6) This disconnect (and Forster admits that “We are not concerned with the very poor. ... this story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.”; Ch 6) comes to the fore when Henry Wilcox repeatedly offers the human nature argument: “If wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there will be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working men would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom.” (Ch 17) and again: “There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal ... when desire for equality has made them happier. ... Our civilization is moulded by great impersonal forces (his voice grew complacent; it always did when he eliminated the personal) ... You grab the dollars. God does the rest.” (Ch 22) Even Leonard accepts this, telling Margaret “There will always be rich and poor” (Ch 26). This insistence (the phrase “rich and poor” occurs nine times in the book) seems to be Forster’s response to what Jesus says in Matthew 26:11: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”?

The Understory

From this comes the understory. Howards End represents rural England as perceived through the lens of nostalgia. This is not a world of toiling and illiterate peasants, periodically culled by famine and pestilence, whose lives are 'nasty, brutish and short'. This is Merrie England where squires are squires and villagers touch their forelocks to the gentry. But for Forster, this is a world of certainties, of traditions and timelessness and stability.

Ruth, the first Mrs Wilcox, is a sort of Mother Nature or Earth Goddess, a mystical figure. As Margaret tells Helen late in the book: “I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. ... She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room.” (Ch 40)

Her improbable marriage to Henry Wilcox is necessary because her world, the world of Howards End of which she is owner, must be connected to the commercial world. Her death, early in the story, disrupts this union. Her solution is to bequeath Howards End to Margaret Schlegel as her “spiritual heir.” (Ch 11).

This informal legacy is set aside by the Wilcoxes, a decision which they justify by arguing that Ruth herself believed in ancestry and her apparently perverse bequest means she has been “treacherous to the family, to the laws of property, to her own written word.” (Ch 11). This action creates the rift which drives the rest of the plot.

It is achieved by fragmenting the issue so as to strip the emotion from it: “The two men ... did not make the mistake of handling human affairs in the bulk, but disposed of them item by item, sharply. ... Considered item by item, the emotional content was minimised, and all went forward smoothly.” (Ch 11) And the effect is to divorce the people inside the house from the world outside: "The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning. Evie’s fox terrier, who had passed for white, was only a dirty grey dog now, so intense was the purity that surrounded him. He was discredited, but the blackbirds that he was chasing glowed with Arabian darkness, for all the conventional colouring of life had been altered. Inside, the clock struck ten with a rich and confident note. Other clocks confirmed it, and the discussion moved towards its close.” (Ch 11)

It reminded me of the legend of the fisher-king, in Arthurian grail-guest legend, whose realm became a desolate landscape after he had committed some grievous sin. Margaret, legally, has been separated from Howards End and the purpose of the test of the novel is to reconnect the two of them; until that happens the world will be wrong. This happens, like all good inciting incidents, just after the 25% mark. The next major turning-point, Henry’s proposal to Margaret, is at 50%. The 75% mark is when we discover Henry’s seedy past.

This reconnection of Margaret with Howards End begins when Henry proposes to her and she becomes, despite obstacles, the second Mrs Wilcox. But she is still not in possession of the house until, in a very ‘Hero’s Journey’ moment, she encounters spooky old Miss Avery, the strange housekeeper who, in echoes of Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, might herself have been the proprietor of Howards End if she had agreed to marry Ruth’s brother. Miss Avery is a wyrd sister, one of the fates, given to prophecy, who mistakes Margaret for Ruth, anointing Margaret as the sanctified successor to Ruth, and says: “I take it you were intended to get Wilcox anyway, whether she got him first or no.” (Ch 33).

The antagonists are the Wilcoxes, especially Henry and Charles. They represent the world of commerce, in particular an imperialist and commercial commerce, specialising in Africa which, as shown on a map in their offices, resembles a whale from which chunks are being hewed (Forster’s nod to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published eleven years earlier, perhaps). The Wilcoxes have gone so far as to build a garage for their cars “all among the wych-elm roots.” (Ch 15) although Henry - the Wilcox who comes closest to connecting with nature, marrying both Ruth and Margaret - does at least say “I shouldn’t want that fine wych-elm spoilt.” (Ch 22)

The wych-elm is a key motif symbolising nature. It appears at the start of the book and the end and fourteen times in between. The ‘wych’ part of the name is obviously symbolic, even though it doesn’t mean ‘witch’ (it derives from the Old English ‘wice’ meaning bendable as in ‘weak’ and ‘wicker’). This wych-elm, based on a real tree at Rookswood, Forster’s childhood home, has in days of yore had pig’s teeth driven into its bark; the local villagers believe it will cure the toothache. It is “under the column of the vast wych-elm” that Paul woos Helen in chapter 4. In chapter 40, Margaret and Helen resolve their differences and reconnect under the shadow of the wych-elm. During this discussion, Margaret is distracted as she thinks of the “teeth that had been thrust into the tree’s bark to medicate it” and Helen actually lays her face against the tree as if the tree will cure a dis-ease worse than toothache.

The ending
The ending is a bit contrived, almost absurdly so. In the very nearly final scene, Margaret and pregnant Helen are hiding out in Howards End; drawn there also, just at the right moment, are guilt-ridden Leonard and avenging angel Charles. Charles, acting as the outraged male and carrying out Henry’s wishes that the bounder who deflowered a female member of his wife’s family should be “thrashed within an inch of his life” (Ch 38); he uses the Schlegel’s father’s sword for this. In a blatantly symbolic act, bibliophile Leonard pulls down a bookcase on top of himself and dies (of a heart attack). Margaret tells Henry she is leaving him but Henry has other worries: he realises that Charles will be convicted of manslaughter. The shame of this cripples Henry; he says: "I’m broken—I’m ended.” (Ch 42). This causes Margaret to change her mind. It reminded me of the end of Jane Eyre in which the feisty heroine can only be reconciled with the wannabe bigamist Rochester after he has been crippled and blinded. The message seems to be that dominant women can only marry alpha males after they have been brought down.

There is an epilogue-like ending set fourteen months on. Connection having been achieved. Margaret, Helen and Henry are living a rural idyll at Howards End with the little son of Leonard and Helen. The hay harvest if splendid. Providing that the westerly gales don’t topple the wych-elm, which would “bring the end of all things” (Ch 44), and now that Henry has been humbled, domesticated and tamed, everyone - except for dead Leonard, imprisoned Charles, and unmentioned Jacky, can live happily ever after.

So it an interesting novel of ideas with multiple themes and several layers but for me the talent of the author shows in the way that he can take such a schematic story and such archetypal characters and disguise it so well with a page-turning plot peopled with characters in whom you can believe.

Cultural references:
Sense and Sensibility
It is said that Jane Austen was EMF’s favourite author. Are Margaret and Helen based on Elinor and Marianne, the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility? The names are resonant: Margaret and Marianne start with the same three letters and Elinor and Helen are fundamentally the same name. But the characters are transposed: Elinor is the prudent one in S&S, Margaret’s equivalent, while Marianne is the more emotional one (Helen). The equivalence is rather marred by the fact that there is a third sister in S&S, called Margaret, who plays almost no part in the story. (Memo to self: must reread Jane Austen’s oeuvre, especially given that this year (2025) is the bicentennial of her death in Winchester.)

A Room With a View
In chapter 13, Margaret is asking Tibby about his intentions for the future. She mentions Mr Vyse who “never strikes me as particularly happy.” Is he the same Mr Vyse as appears in A Room With a View, in which he is a rejected suitor?

L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun
At the classical music concert in chapter 5, Mrs Munt (Aunt Juley) gives, as an example of music she doesn’t like, “something about a faun in French”. This is presumably Debussy’s Prelude L’Apres-Midi d’un Faun which was first performed in December 1894. Since Howards End was published in 1910, EMF would not have known of the ballet to this music which was choreographed by Nijinsky and performed by himself with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, whose May 1912 premiere in Paris is sometimes regarded as the birth of modern ballet.

Tom Jones
When Mr Wilcox takes Margaret for a meal at Simpsons-on-the-Strand, she observes that “the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams or Tom Jones.” (Ch 17)

Richard II by Shakespeare
Margaret wonders about England: “Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls?” (Ch 19) In John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II, England is compared to a “precious stone set in a silver sea.”

Selected quotes:

“It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious ... the confidence trick is the work of a man but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.” (Ch 5)
“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge.” (Ch 5)
“I do not go in for being musical ... I only care for music - a very different thing. but still I will say this for myself - I do know when I like a thing and when I don't.” (Ch 5)
“It was the kind of scene that may be observed all over London, whatever the locality - bricks and mortar rising and falling with the restlessness of the water in a fountain, as the city receives more and more men upon her soil.” (Ch 6)
“She felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of Life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.” (Ch 7)
“Money pads the edges of things ... God help those who have none.” (Ch 7)
“To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory.” (Ch 8)
“She mistrusted the periods of quiet that are essential to true growth.” (Ch 10)
“So the sailors of Ulysses voyaged past the Sirens, having first stopped one another's ears with wool.” (Ch 11)
“Oxford is - Oxford; not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge.” (Ch 12) Forster had a life-long association with King's College Cambridge
“She knew this type very well - the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books.” (Ch 14)
“Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first. What right had Mr Bast to profit?” (Ch 15)
“Independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.” (Ch 15)
“Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world’s waters when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores.” (Ch 20) Because everything is connected.
“No Wilcox could live near, or near the possessions of, any other Wilcox. They had the colonial spirit, and were always making for some spot where the white man might carry his burden unobserved.” (Ch 24) The Wilcoxes can't even connect with one another.
“Margaret ... never forgot anyone for whom she had once cared; she connected, though the connection might be bitter, and she hoped that some day Henry would do the same.” (Ch 25)
“Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature’s to keep things going?” (Ch 28) There's a disconnect!
“Were all Helen’s actions to be governed by a tiny mishap, such as may happen to any young man or woman?” (Ch 34) Delicious misdirection! Margaret is thinking that Helen has been driven mad by regret over her one-night engagement to Paul Wilcox. In fact, Helen’s odd behaviour is later to be exp[lained by the fact that she is pregnant following a one-night-stand with Leonard Bast.
“Of all the means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.” (Ch 41)