Marriage (book chapter)

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

2025

Publisher

Edward Elgar Publishing

Source Publication

Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature

Source ISSN

9781803925905

Abstract

This entry examines the centrality of marriage law to the development of Anglo-American fiction from the eighteenth century to the present day. The entry begins by discussing how writers such as Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy participated in debates about the legal regulation of marriage in England, focusing on Lord Hardwicke’s 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act and the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act. The entry considers how writers interrogated legal rules concerning the formation and dissolution of marriage as well as the legal fiction of marital unity. The entry considers similar debates in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, discussing Henry James’s and Edith Wharton’s responses to women’s lack of freedom and equality in marriage, as well as Nella Larsen’s treatment of the prohibition on interracial unions. The entry concludes by turning to recent reimaginings of the marriage plot, considering how Jeffrey Eugenides draws upon and subverts the tradition of marriage in Anglo-American fiction while interrogating the legal fictions that structure conjugal life.

Comments

"Marriage" in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature. Eds. Robert E. Spoo and Simon Stern. Cheltenham UK: 2025: 307-311. Publisher link.

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