What Goddess, or what Muse must I invoke to guide me through these vast, unexplored regions of fancy? – regions inhabited by wisdom and folly, – by wit and stupidity, – by religion and profaneness, – by morality and licentiousness.

If you think about it, the wreckage of families in the novels of Jane Austen is unnerving. In the novels of her sister authors it is appalling. These women – Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, among the less obscure ones – describe what was to them a terrifying shift in their society's concept of the family, a profound change that marks the difference between the world of Grandison, the world they had lost, and the world in which unhappily they found themselves adrift.

… the family will be studied less for its own sake, as an isolated phenomenon of historical social structure – a statistical mean household size – but rather as an important and still poorly fathomed intermediary between economic change and its qualitatively experienced effects, as for example on social relations.