Jeane N. Olson

That contemporaneous reviewers of E. M. Forster Howards End failed to recognize his prescient image of a radically new family structure is hardly surprising. In 1910 the institutional, middle-class family in England -- static, authoritarian, and based on consanguinity and primogeniture -- was still assumed as a given by most readers and novelists. As a result, few readers or novelists at the beginning of this century questioned the accepted institutional model of the family or foresaw the possibility of rejuvenating it to enhance individuality and equality in the family circle.

Thus D. H. Lawrence set the opening chapters of The Rainbow at a farm significantly called "The Marsh," but he employed the symbolism of that name narrowly, focusing on women's defiant seizure of sexual freedom rather than remolding the entire family. Expanding on the metaphor, one might say that just as a marsh is a protected nursery richly supplied with the elements necessary for the nurturance and protection of young marine life, so a more expansive and flexible form of the family could provide a richer context for human fulfillment. Forster visualized a more egalitarian, inclusive family that would be a fertile seedbed where all its members, deeply rooted in the past and securely connected with their own emotions, might be equally enriched by energizing currents from the outside.

In his massive study, Lawrence Stone sees that the family was very gradually moving from "distance, deference and patriarchy" to what he calls "affective individualism."¹ Though he finds the seeds of his main features of the modern family in key segments of English society as early as 1750, in the following hundred years, the development of this new family type actually regressed until the end of the Victorian period, when it began to spread slowly into other classes of English society.² Peter Gay The Tender Passion, while focusing on examples of true love in marriage, acknowledges "the smoke screens thrown up by purposeful propriety, diligent self-censorship, and tense moral preoccupations"³ by

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