Abstract
This chapter introduces the reader to the extraordinary correspondence of our couple, Harry Logan and Gwyneth Murray, and places their discussions of the interrelationship between sex, love and marriage in the context of British culture in the Edwardian period. Further, we discuss the historical scholarship pertaining to gender history, the history of modernities, and the history of sexuality, indicating how first-person accounts of courtship and marriage revise this established historiography. It suggests ways as to how ordinary middle-class people who kept their faith nevertheless negotiated the transition from Victorian to modern, which included a greater value placed on sexual freedom, personal relationships, psychological introspection, and greater emotional expressiveness.
“The inner laws of the sex-passion, of love, and of all human relationships—must gradually appear and take the lead, since they alone are the powers which can create and uphold a rational society; and that the outer laws—since they are dead and lifeless things—must inevitably disappear. Real love is only possible in the freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality.”
Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (1896)
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- 1.
LAC, Logan Fonds, 7:1, G to H, 20 Nov. 1912; ibid., 1:6, H to G, n.d. Nov. 1912.
- 2.
We owe this excellent concept to our editor Sean Brady.
- 3.
Kern, The Modernist Novel, 2–3.
- 4.
Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love.
- 5.
For an excellent discussion of the current state of the field in Britain, see Jones and Harris, “Introduction: Historicizing ‘Modern’ Love and Romance”, 1–19.
- 6.
Stansky, “On or About December 1910”, 2.
- 7.
Cook, “Victorian Sexualities”, 175.
- 8.
LAC, LF, 11:6, H to father, 11 Nov. 1912; ibid., 18:6, Rosfrith to Mrs Logan, 6 Dec. 1910, 16 Jan. 1916; ibid., 1:12, H to G, 5 Dec. 1914; ibid., 9:2, G to H, 10 Feb. 1918; Rhodes House Archives, Harry Logan Biographical File, Gwyneth to Dr. Williams, 16 Mar. 1971; ibid., Stuart Keate, “Harry: The Gentle Professor”, clipping, n.d.
- 9.
Whitebook, Freud, 129.
- 10.
LAC LF, 1:6, H to G, 2 Nov. 1912, 21 Apr. 1912.
- 11.
LAC, LF, 1:2, H to G, 17 Sep. 1911.
- 12.
LAC, LF, 2:10, H to G, 8 Apr. 1917; ibid., 7:10, G to H, 27 Aug. 1916.
- 13.
Roper, “Between Manliness and Masculinity”, 345.
- 14.
Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety”, 112, which critiques a developing trajectory in the historical study of emotions which has relied heavily on prescriptive literature. For explicit statements about the need to examine the way in which individuals negotiate emotional protocols, see Reddy, “Historical Research on the Self and Emotions”, 302–15; Roper, The Secret Battle, 1–43. The foundational statement for the history of emotions is Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. See also, Plamper, The History of Emotions; Frevert, Emotional Lexicons. For Britain, see Francis, “Tears, Trantrums, and Bared Teeth”, 354–87; Cook, “From Controlling Emotions to Expressing Feelings”, 627–46. Our work revises the periodization of the division between emotional self-control and expression.
- 15.
See, for example, Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society; Porter and Hall, The Facts of Life; Hall, Hidden Anxieties; Bland and Doan, eds., Sexology Uncensored; Crozier, “The Medical Construction of Homosexuality and its Relation to the Law in Nineteenth-Century England”, 61–82; Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body. The influence of medical knowledge upon sexual identities has now begun to be questioned. See Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 19, 23; Cocks, “Approaches to the History of Sexuality Since 1750”, 38–54.
- 16.
Houlbrook, “‘A Pin to See the Peepshow’”, 215–49.
- 17.
Here we are critical of the conclusions of Light, Forever England, who uncritically assumes that fiction directly reflects prevailing attitudes, without recognizing that some of the writers she studies came of age in the Edwardian period.
- 18.
Stansky, “On or About December 1910”; Brooke, Sexual Politics; Lutz, Pleasure Bound; Stansell, American Moderns; Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde; Fernihough, Freewomen and Supermen; Snitow, Stansell, Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire; MacLaren, “Sex Radicalism in the Canadian Northwest, 1890–1920”, 527–46; Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life. For scholarship which emphasizes more conservative roots of modernism, see Thomson, Psychological Subjects; Kent, Sex and Suffrage; Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century; Stone, Breeding Superman; Greenslade, Degeneration; Dobb, “‘The Way of All Flesh’”, 589–603; Morgan, “A ‘Feminist Conspiracy’”, 777–800; Owen, “Occultism and the ‘Modern’ Self in Fin-de-Siècle Britain”, 81–96.
- 19.
Kern, The Modernist Novel; Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality.
- 20.
Houlbrook, “Cities”, 148–9, 133–56; Doan and Bland, eds., Cultural Sexology, 3; Doan, “‘A peculiarly obscure subject’”, 87–108, on how heterosexual and homosexual have not been trans-historical categories; Carden-Coyne and Doan, “Gender and Sexuality”, 91–114.
- 21.
The work of Stopes is often the starting point for much of the scholarship on twentieth-century British sexuality. See, for example, Hall, Hidden Anxieties; Burke, “In Pursuit of an Erogamic Life”; Hall, Dear Dr. Stopes; McKibbin, “Introduction”, vii–liii.
- 22.
Langhamer, The English in Love; Langhamer, “Love, Selfhood and Authenticity in Post-War Britain”, 277–97; Francis, The Flyer, 63–84; Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution; Fisher, “‘Lay Back, Enjoy It and Shout Happy England’”, 318–60; Fisher, “Marriage and Companionate Ideals Since 1750”, 328–48.
- 23.
Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution; Brown, The Death of Christian Britain; Brown, “Gender, Christianity, and the Rise of No Religion”, 39–59. For the sexual revolution as a media construct, see Brewitt-Taylor, “Christianity and the Invention of the Sexual Revolution in Britain”, 519–46.
- 24.
On this point, see McKibbin, “Introduction”, xxiii.
- 25.
Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 219–20.
- 26.
There is now a vast literature on World War I as the crucible of literary, artistic and psychological modernity. See, for example, Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory; Leed, No Man’s Land; Eksteins, Rites of Spring.
- 27.
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body; Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain; Doan, Fashioning Sapphism; Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed, who identifies the explicit naming of homosexuality with the 1920s, 169–86.
- 28.
Kern, The Culture of Love, 347–9; Hynes, A War Imagined, 399–401.
- 29.
Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body. See also Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning.
- 30.
Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity.
- 31.
MMUA, Vera Brittain Papers, Box 50, Diary, 21 Oct. 1913.
- 32.
Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, xiii.
- 33.
Brittain, Testament of Youth.
- 34.
LAC, LF, 8:10, G to H, 29 Sep. 1917.
- 35.
Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain, 88–115.
- 36.
For historians positing a more gradual linear decline of religion, in which the Edwardian era marks a key moment in which the canons of moral puritanism were increasingly assailed by the forces of liberalization, see McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914; Green, The Passing of Protestant England. For revisionists who see a sudden rupture in the 1960s between religion and the imperatives of secularization, Brown, The Death of Christian Britain.
- 37.
There is now an emerging literature which presents a more variegated picture of the relationship between religion and sexuality which does not simply cast Christianity as a morally repressive force. See, for example, Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality; Gibson and Begiato, Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century; Cocks, “Religion and Spirituality”, 157–79. On sex and religion in Canada, see Christie, “Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Post-War Canada”, 348–76.
- 38.
Tosh, “The History of Masculinity”, 25, 17–34.
- 39.
Tosh, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?”, 193, 196, 179–202; Showalter, Sexual Anarchy.
- 40.
Our analysis of their attitudes to homosociality has been influenced by Queer Theory and we have therefore purposely left aside the question as to whether Gwyneth or Harry gave physical expression to their same-sex intimacies. Despite their acquaintance with the new sexology, they did not accept the taxonomy of homosexuality and heterosexuality posited by early twentieth-century sexologists. See, for example, Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, 12, 18; Janes, Visions of Queer Martyrdom, 5; Houlbrook, Queer London; Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed, 160–207; Carden-Coyne and Doan, “Gender and Sexuality”, 91–114.
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Christie, N., Gauvreau, M. (2018). Introduction: Making Love Sexual in the Edwardian Age. In: Bodies, Love, and Faith in the First World War. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72835-3_1
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