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Dowell even suggests at one point that Leonora was ‘pimping for Edward’, and it is true that she plays a strangely proactive role in his infidelities. For instance, if Ashburnham had not been travelling in a third-class railway carriage to save money, he would not have come across the Kilsyte girl: as Dowell puts it, ‘It is part of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would certainly never have kissed that nursemaid if he had not been trying to please Leonora.’ And it is Leonora’s worldly priest who suggests that she should take her rather prudish husband to Monte Carlo in order that he may indulge in a ‘touch of irresponsibility’ (which he does, of course, with disastrous results). The same drive for economies which drives Ashburnham into the arms of the Kilsyte girl also takes him and his wife to India. By renting out Bramshaw Manor, Leonora straightens out the Ashburnham finances, but by moving to the subcontinent and going into retreat at Simla she abandons her husband to Mrs Basil. Lastly, it is Leonora’s idea to bring Maisie Maidan to Nauheim, and it is Leonora who suggests that she and Edward sit next to the Dowells at dinner. She does so to outface Florence (who has cottoned on to the true state of the Ashburnhams’ marriage when untangling Leonora’s wrist from Maisie Maidan’s hair earlier that day), but Leonora must have been aware that she was placing more temptation in her husband’s path. And even if she didn’t quite see it this way, Ashburnham’s ‘appreciative gurgle’ should have sounded like a tocsin in her ears rather than occasioning nothing more than ‘a slight hesitation’ on her part. The next time Ashburnham gurgles that evening Leonora shivers ‘as if a goose had walked over her grave’, a typically Dowellian trope that is both creepy and droll in equal measure.

Yet Leonora feels utterly betrayed by her husband and has suffered at his hands for many years. In Dowell’s eyes Ashburnham is a ‘sentimentalist’, but in his wife’s he is lecherous. For Dowell, Ashburnham is a noble and duty-bound traditionalist, but as far as Leonora is concerned his fling with La Dolciquita shows that he is careless of his inheritance in that he almost loses his house and land as a result of it. To Dowell, Ashburnham is generous; to Leonora, he is profligate. With hardly any clothes of her own, she buys the expensive travelling cases for Ashburnham as a sign of her devotion to him, and it is the depth of her love for her husband which accounts for the depth of her bitterness when she finds out she has been deceived. A convent girl and a woman of unbending faith, Leonora first realizes her husband and Florence are intimate when Florence touches his wrist over the glass case covering one of the most important documents of the Protestant Reformation. It is this which makes the revelation of his faithlessness almost unendurable. And while Leonora is a woman of principle, it is Ashburnham’s rigidity, not hers, which leads to Nancy being sent back to her father, ‘a violent madman of a fellow’ who has previously smashed her mother to the floor, whose voice makes Nancy almost lose consciousness, and who once knocked her out for a full three days. According to Leonora, Ashburnham’s determination to return Nancy to her father is ‘the most atrocious thing’ he has done in his ‘atrocious life’ and it’s hard to disagree with her. That Nancy goes under mentally while crossing the same Red Sea from which Ashburnham has twice plucked ‘Tommies’ is one of the novel’s more piercing ironies.

Dowell’s attitude to Leonora is coloured in various ways. He is antagonistic to her religion; he is something of a misogynist who thinks all women are ‘intolerably cruel to the beloved person’, and, above all, in setting herself against Ashburnham and corrupting Nancy, Leonora harms ‘the only two persons’ whom Dowell says he ‘ever really loved’. Indeed, when Dowell first sees Ashburnham, his enraptured tone is all the more noteworthy in that at no point does he direct the kind of language he uses then or at other times in the novel to his wife or to another