I collect fictional quotes about umbrellas. I first did so after reading ‘No one writes to the Colonel” by Gabriel García Márquez. Since then I have found fictional brollies everywhere!
At the beginning of Howards End, Helen Schlegel absent-mindedly takes home the wrong umbrella. Leonard Bast, a low paid clerk who yearns for education and ‘culture’, retrieves his brolly from the Schlegels’ house. Here the gulf between their classes yawns wide — they have countless umbrellas and he has just the one, and it’s in appalling condition .
Another umbrella for your collection. This one is from To the Lighthouse, and I am convinced it is meant to indirectly connect Charles Tansley to Leonard Bast:
“Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that–hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it
might be–Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.”