Howards End

by

E. M. Forster

Margaret Schlegel Character Analysis

Margaret is twenty-nine years old and unmarried at the beginning of Howards End, unusual for a woman at the time. She has been watching over her younger siblings, Helen and Tibby, since the age of thirteen, when their mother died. Their mother was an English heiress who married a German intellectual. Never having been to university, Margaret is nonetheless highly educated and cultured. With an inherited fortune ensuring lifelong financial security, she enjoys unlimited leisure time to study art, literature, and philosophy, and tends to muse deeply about human nature and society. She loves deeply, as well, and her generous love for her family, her country, and her husband can compel her to overlook their worst flaws. She makes a sudden and profound connection with Ruth Wilcox, a woman her mother’s age, before Ruth’s death at just fifty-one years old. Ruth leaves her old house, Howards End, to Margaret, but Ruth’s family refuses to accept her wishes and keeps her will a secret. Margaret then gradually develops an affection for Ruth’s widowed husband, Henry, despite their dramatically different temperaments, and marries him. Her relationship with Henry leads her to forgo some of her former principles. Earlier in the novel, she and Helen befriended a young man named Leonard Bast, and became troubled by his financial hardship and his difficulties achieving his modest dreams of becoming knowledgeable about art. When later she learns that Leonard’s wife, Jacky, was Henry’s mistress long ago, she swiftly abandons the Basts to abject poverty. She remains loyal to her sister above all, and defies Henry when he tries to stop Helen from sleeping in Howards End on Helen’s final night in England. After the crisis that follows, she brings both the Wilcox and the Schlegel families together in Howards End, and reconciles them to building a new future together. Henry finally gives her Howards End, and she bequeaths it to her nephew, Helen’s son.

Margaret Schlegel Quotes in Howards End

The Howards End quotes below are all either spoken by Margaret Schlegel or refer to Margaret Schlegel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Class and Privilege Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

“When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

Related Characters: Helen Schlegel (speaker), Margaret Schlegel, Paul Wilcox
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:

“The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid; often seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

“Oh, Meg—, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel (speaker), Paul Wilcox
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man…you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen’s Hall, dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Leonard Bast
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see some one near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Juley Munt
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

…[Leonard’s] outburst ended in a swamp of books. No disrespect to these great names. The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination. And Leonard had reached the destination. He had visited the county of Surrey when darkness covered its amenities, and its cosy villas had re-entered ancient night. Every twelve hours this miracle happens, but he had troubled to go and see for himself. Within his cramped little mind dwelt something that was greater than Jefferies’ books—the spirit that led Jefferies to write them.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Helen Schlegel, Leonard Bast
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks, Books
Page Number: 85-86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking…so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Leonard Bast
Related Symbols: Books
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

“I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life—good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall never, understand.”

Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more than do most women as yet…Yet he did alter her character—a little. There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker)
Page Number: 125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

It was the first [Margaret] had heard of the mews behind Ducie Street. When she was a possible tenant it had suppressed itself, not consciously, but automatically. The breezy Wilcox manner, though genuine, lacked the clearness of vision that is imperative for truth. When Henry lived in Ducie Street he remembered the mews; when he tried to let he forgot it; and if any one had remarked that the mews must be either there or not, he would have felt annoyed, and afterwards have found some opportunity of stigmatising the speaker as academic. So does my grocer stigmatise me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price? It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

Whether as boy, husband, or widower, [Henry] had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad…Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. Amabat, amare timebat. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

…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 height.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

[Margaret] was glad to go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa itself had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth. Not that a visit to the office cleared things up…even when she penetrated to the inner depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for blubber.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Nothing could have exceeded the kindness of the two men. They raised windows for some ladies, and lowered them for others, they rang the bell for the servant, they identified the colleges as the train slipped past Oxford, they caught books or bag-purses in the act of tumbling on to the floor…. Margaret bowed to a charm of which she did not wholly approve, and said nothing when the Oxford colleges were identified wrongly. “Male and female created He them”; the journey to Shrewsbury confirmed this questionable statement, and the long glass saloon, that moved so easily and felt so comfortable, became a forcing-house for the idea of sex.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

[Charles] described what he believed to have happened. Albert had flattened out a cat, and Miss Schlegel had lost her nerve, as any woman might. She had been got safely into the other car, but when it was in motion had leapt out again, in spite of all that they could say. After walking a little on the road, she had calmed down and had said that she was sorry. His father accepted this explanation, and neither knew that Margaret had artfully prepared the way for it. It fitted in too well with their view of feminine nature.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox, Charles Wilcox
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

“I shall never get work now. If rich people fail at one profession, they can try another. Not I. I had my groove, and I’ve got out of it. I could do one particular branch of insurance in one particular office well enough to command a salary, but that’s all. Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”

Related Characters: Leonard Bast (speaker), Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Books
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Now and then [Henry] asked [Margaret] whether she could possibly forgive him, and she answered, “I have already forgiven you, Henry.” She chose her words carefully, and so saved him from panic. She played the girl, until he could rebuild his fortress and hide his soul from the world. When the butler came to clear away, Henry was in a very different mood—asked the fellow what he was in such a hurry for, complained of the noise last night in the servants’ hall. Margaret looked intently at the butler. He, as a handsome young man, was faintly attractive to her as a woman—an attraction so faint as scarcely to be perceptible, yet the skies would have fallen if she had mentioned it to Henry.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Henry Wilcox
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 33 Quotes

All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 192
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38 Quotes

“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’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect… Only say to yourself, ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done.’”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel, Henry Wilcox, Leonard Bast, Ruth Wilcox, Jacky Bast
Page Number: 221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 42 Quotes

Margaret was silent. Something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered.

“I didn’t do wrong, did I?” [Henry] asked, bending down.

“You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.”

From the garden came laughter. “Here they are at last!” exclaimed Henry, disengaging himself with a smile. Helen rushed into the gloom, holding Tom by one hand and carrying her baby on the other. There were shouts of infectious joy.

“The field’s cut!” Helen cried excitedly—“the big meadow! We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel (speaker), Henry Wilcox (speaker), Ruth Wilcox
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis:
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Margaret Schlegel Quotes in Howards End

The Howards End quotes below are all either spoken by Margaret Schlegel or refer to Margaret Schlegel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Class and Privilege Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

“When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.”

Related Characters: Helen Schlegel (speaker), Margaret Schlegel, Paul Wilcox
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:

“The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements, death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid; often seems the real one—there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

“Oh, Meg—, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel (speaker), Paul Wilcox
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 20
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man…you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at two shillings. It is cheap, even if you hear it in the Queen’s Hall, dreariest music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Leonard Bast
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see some one near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Juley Munt
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

…[Leonard’s] outburst ended in a swamp of books. No disrespect to these great names. The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination. And Leonard had reached the destination. He had visited the county of Surrey when darkness covered its amenities, and its cosy villas had re-entered ancient night. Every twelve hours this miracle happens, but he had troubled to go and see for himself. Within his cramped little mind dwelt something that was greater than Jefferies’ books—the spirit that led Jefferies to write them.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Helen Schlegel, Leonard Bast
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks, Books
Page Number: 85-86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking…so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Leonard Bast
Related Symbols: Books
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

“I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life—good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall never, understand.”

Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more than do most women as yet…Yet he did alter her character—a little. There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker)
Page Number: 125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

It was the first [Margaret] had heard of the mews behind Ducie Street. When she was a possible tenant it had suppressed itself, not consciously, but automatically. The breezy Wilcox manner, though genuine, lacked the clearness of vision that is imperative for truth. When Henry lived in Ducie Street he remembered the mews; when he tried to let he forgot it; and if any one had remarked that the mews must be either there or not, he would have felt annoyed, and afterwards have found some opportunity of stigmatising the speaker as academic. So does my grocer stigmatise me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price? It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

Whether as boy, husband, or widower, [Henry] had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad…Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. Amabat, amare timebat. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

…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 height.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

[Margaret] was glad to go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa itself had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth. Not that a visit to the office cleared things up…even when she penetrated to the inner depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map. Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for blubber.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Nothing could have exceeded the kindness of the two men. They raised windows for some ladies, and lowered them for others, they rang the bell for the servant, they identified the colleges as the train slipped past Oxford, they caught books or bag-purses in the act of tumbling on to the floor…. Margaret bowed to a charm of which she did not wholly approve, and said nothing when the Oxford colleges were identified wrongly. “Male and female created He them”; the journey to Shrewsbury confirmed this questionable statement, and the long glass saloon, that moved so easily and felt so comfortable, became a forcing-house for the idea of sex.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:

[Charles] described what he believed to have happened. Albert had flattened out a cat, and Miss Schlegel had lost her nerve, as any woman might. She had been got safely into the other car, but when it was in motion had leapt out again, in spite of all that they could say. After walking a little on the road, she had calmed down and had said that she was sorry. His father accepted this explanation, and neither knew that Margaret had artfully prepared the way for it. It fitted in too well with their view of feminine nature.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel, Henry Wilcox, Charles Wilcox
Related Symbols: Cars and Walks
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

“I shall never get work now. If rich people fail at one profession, they can try another. Not I. I had my groove, and I’ve got out of it. I could do one particular branch of insurance in one particular office well enough to command a salary, but that’s all. Poetry’s nothing, Miss Schlegel. One’s thoughts about this and that are nothing. Your money, too, is nothing, if you’ll understand me. I mean if a man over twenty once loses his own particular job, it’s all over with him. I have seen it happen to others. Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It’s no good. It’s the whole world pulling. There always will be rich and poor.”

Related Characters: Leonard Bast (speaker), Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Books
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Now and then [Henry] asked [Margaret] whether she could possibly forgive him, and she answered, “I have already forgiven you, Henry.” She chose her words carefully, and so saved him from panic. She played the girl, until he could rebuild his fortress and hide his soul from the world. When the butler came to clear away, Henry was in a very different mood—asked the fellow what he was in such a hurry for, complained of the noise last night in the servants’ hall. Margaret looked intently at the butler. He, as a handsome young man, was faintly attractive to her as a woman—an attraction so faint as scarcely to be perceptible, yet the skies would have fallen if she had mentioned it to Henry.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Henry Wilcox
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 33 Quotes

All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder-rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 192
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 38 Quotes

“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’s alive and cants with her memory when she’s dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect… Only say to yourself, ‘What Helen has done, I’ve done.’”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel, Henry Wilcox, Leonard Bast, Ruth Wilcox, Jacky Bast
Page Number: 221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 42 Quotes

Margaret was silent. Something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered.

“I didn’t do wrong, did I?” [Henry] asked, bending down.

“You didn’t, darling. Nothing has been done wrong.”

From the garden came laughter. “Here they are at last!” exclaimed Henry, disengaging himself with a smile. Helen rushed into the gloom, holding Tom by one hand and carrying her baby on the other. There were shouts of infectious joy.

“The field’s cut!” Helen cried excitedly—“the big meadow! We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!”

Related Characters: Margaret Schlegel (speaker), Helen Schlegel (speaker), Henry Wilcox (speaker), Ruth Wilcox
Related Symbols: Howards End
Page Number: 246
Explanation and Analysis: