Fin de siècle is a phrase “suggestive of everything new and odd”―a phrase which embraces “[a]ll, young or old, regardless of color, creed, and sex, who rush head over heels with new ideas towards the 20th century” (Critic fin de siècle, www.jstor.org/stable/20494209). According to Morag Shiac (“Reading the modernist novel; and introduction” by Morag Shiach; we read this article for the second class) “[f]in-de-siecle novelists created their fictional texts at a moment when key social institutions were under particular pressure” which there is no doubt that the family, in What Maisie Knew, stands as one clear example (128). “They were writing at a moment of significant historical transition. Technological innovations, rapid urbanization, changing patterns of Empire, political realignments, and the destabili-zation of a range of social institutions all generated particular pressures on the literary imagination of the 1890s” (Shiac 128). Although there is no consensus on when this movement begins (Wolf considers starting in 1910s, as the example given by Shiac) “there is nonetheless a broad recognition that the turn of the century saw transformations that generated a significantly, and often painfully, new social reality” (Shiac 128).