The plot turns on who will live in Howards End: the progressive Schlegels or the ruthless, venal Wilcox family, headed by Henry, who thinks he is being unsentimental (rather than uncaring) when he says: “The poor are poor. Watching the film again, restored gorgeously for its 25th anniversary, I remember how it woke me up to more. From Howards End, I learned to love bluebells, and to fear bookcases. Instead, he ends up dead, crushed (with horrible irony) by a bookcase. I believed that if I, too, found myself out rowing with an intriguing young man, and the rowing turned into snogging, we would just put down our oars and conveniently drift into some bulrushes for a private tryst.īut Leonard and Helen don’t end up together. I wanted him, and I wanted to be Helen/Helena: impetuous, passionate, rule-breaking a rackety, bohemian bluestocking in fabulous frocks, all cinched-in waists, high collars, trailing skirts and acres of lace. Like the Schlegel sisters (Bonham Carter’s Helen and Emma Thompson’s Margaret), I was captivated by the romance of Leonard’s adventure. I didn’t want politics that seemed, back then, a jumble of John Major eating peas on Spitting Image, the Queen having her annus horribilis, and no bins at tube stations because of the IRA.Įmma Thompson as Margaret Schlegel. I didn’t care that Merchant Ivory were derided as “the Laura Ashley school of film-making”.

I wanted Howards End to be all pretty lawns and picture hats. I was doing my Grade 5 piano and I’d had my first kiss, next to a hedge at the end of my road, trying to make my hair billow madly like Bonham Carter’s throughout. My gateway drug had been A Room with a View, and all I wanted was to be kissed among violets, to play the piano wildly, messily and boldly, and to live the same way. Going to see Howards End at the cinema in 1992, I knew the house gave the film its name, just like I knew there was definitely no apostrophe. She looks cross, he looks tormented, and behind them is a dream of a house, wreathed in roses and wisteria. I t was the poster that got me: Samuel West kissing Helena Bonham Carter.

Howards end author