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 met-
aphor, 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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