Howards End: long spoiler

So if you have no idea what happens in Howards End you shouldn't read this.

I wrote this after reading the book, not watching the programme.

I am completely mystified by how Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast had sex. One tries to figure out his attitude - did he seduce her to punish her because she had ruined his chances in life and made him look foolish? And did she go along with this because she felt guilty and wanted to give him what he wanted?

Did she take the initiative because she had always found him attractive and wanted to show him that he still had value? Did neither of them, at any point say, "hang on, this isn't a good idea."? I think she was an impulsive person, and inexperienced, but he was an experienced man and could have used caution.

Was it a rape? But if it was a rape why didn't she say so?

Anyway, in the introduction to this old Penguin edition I find that I am by no means the first in finding this very unbelievable.  The first reader was the publisher (or the publisher's reader) who said that this "episode" was "unconvincing". Forster said, "I agree with you about Helen...I hope however the public may find the book convincing on other counts."

From the intro to the Penguin: "Reader after reader, however, has expressed plain incredulity." In a long-ago Spectator review it was referred to as "Helen's extraordinary act of self-sacrifice". Percy Lubbock [who he?] thought it "rather steep". Katherine Mansfield was uncertain "whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella".

Forster said: "I did it like that out of a wish to have surprises. It has to be a surprise for Margaret, and this was best done by making it a surprise for the reader too. Too much may have been sacrificed to this."

So he could have told us that the two were attracted to each other and a romantic affair became possible (but how, really, in two people so separated by fortune and class?) but he didn't because he wanted it to be a surprise.

This seems to me to ruin the book and so I wouldn't have given it a place in the canon.  I remember thinking "The Longest Journey" was a very good book. Forster himself wrote in later life that he didn't actually care for Howards End; "not a single character in it for whom I care ... I feel pride in the achievement but cannot love it..."

He didn't enjoy writing novels: " am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death - the latter is truly an ally of the personal against the mechanical."
"Thought my novel very bad, but though it is pumped [sic] it's not quite as bad as I thought for the characters are conceived sincerely. Will it ever be done? A fortnight ago I should have said not, but am hopeful now... But take it all round, I've lost inspiration, and not adequately replaced it by solidity. Words are more in the foreground than they were: even these I seem writing for an audience".

The TV programme ended on a note I missed in the book. A kind of triumphant feminism - "we women are so nice; we have fixed our lives so it's all pretty and fertile and looking to the future..."  Helen wearing her hair down. Looking thrilled to have got rid of Bast (dead) and Charles (prison) so they could have a lovely time at "Howards End" rejoicing about the greenness of the hay.