Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Howards End, E. M. Forster - Jeane N. Olson (essay date fall 1993)

Jeane N. Olson (essay date fall 1993)

SOURCE: Olson, Jeane N. “E. M. Forster's Prophetic Vision of the Modern Family in Howards End.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35, no. 3 (fall 1993): 347-62.

[In the following essay, Olson argues that Forster's families in Howards End prefigure modern family structure.]

That contemporaneous reviewers of E. M. Forster's Howards End [hereafter referred to as HE] 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...

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