It’s been seven years since the wonderful serial adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howards End came out, and six since my post in response. Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit about neurodivergence, and a recent comment on social media catalyzed this new idea for me: Helen and Margaret Schlegel have ADHD.

I may have known it, subconsciously, when I wrote that Helen “questions everything, blurts out opinions and reactions without thinking, and leaves chaos in her wake. The story opens with her upsetting everyone in the Schlegel and Wilcox households by acting on an impulse that she later regrets, a pattern she repeats again and again despite escalating consequences. Her usual reaction is to run away.”

Margaret too is impulsive, if not quite so much as Helen. She leaps into action at the slightest provocation, answers Henry’s proposal before he can get halfway through it, yet struggles to make any decision.

The film version of 1992 by the Merchant Ivory team misses this aspect entirely. Helen is portrayed as foolishly romantic while Margaret is the staid and steady one–possibly influencing Thompson’s screenplay for the 1995 film “Sense & Sensibility,’ where Thompson plays the thoughtful, cautious sister Elinor to Kate Winslet’s overly romantic Marianne.

Yet the 2017 television show captures it, which I did not realize at the time. In that series, Helen and Margaret are both eager, voluble, impulsive, and at times obsessive characters who often act before they think. In an early scene, the shy and uncertain Leonard Bast has come to retrieve his umbrella that Helen accidentally took away with her from a concert. The two women surge at him like untrained, barking dogs jumping up on a visitor. Leonard is overwhelmed and soon runs away. Margaret realizes after the fact that they were too enthusiastic, and rebukes their brother for not protecting the visitor from “screaming women.”

It turns out Leonard does need protection from them, because when they pursue the connection, Margaret, who knows nothing about business, relays a rumor to him she heard from her fiance Henry Wilcox about Leonard’s place of employment, a bank, and advises him to find another job. He does so, at a lower salary. It turns out that his old bank does not go under. Then Leonard, who eventually loses that job as well.

Worse is to come. Helen blames Henry for ruining Leonard. She hauls Leonard and his wife to the reception for Margaret’s wedding,, intending to confront Henry. There Leonard’s wife gets drunk and reveals that she was once Henry’s mistress. Helen runs away with Leonard, impulsively sleeps with him, and gets pregnant. When this is made known, Henry’s son Charles attacks Leonard, who dies of a heart attack. Charles goes to jail for murder, and Henry has nervous breakdown. The story ends with the two sisters living together with Helen’s baby and a docile Henry, who has accepted that he cannot control Margaret and allows her to run her household to her own liking.

Forster presents the Schlegel sisters as truth-revealers and catalysts for necessary change introduced into the static, conventional lives of the Wilcoxes, while skating lightly over the havoc they wreak while acting out of the best intentions possible. He is sympathetic to them, and we are too, for after all, they only expose the faults inherent in their society and the lies others have told, and Forster presents the Wilcoxes almost entirely in an unflattering light.

Much as I love this book, I have to wonder: is the narrator to be trusted?

Some believe that Forster based the sisters on his friends, the sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Curious, I went looking to see if anyone else had suggested that these women might be neurodivergent–and found that quite a few scholars believe that they were. So it may well be that, intentionally or not, in Howards End Forster is giving us a powerful depiction of two neurodivergent women who managed to find a “room of their own” in a society that did not understand them in the least.