Introduction: Making Love Sexual in the Edwardian Age

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.