Crivelli on Eighteenth-Century English Marriage and Inheritance Law in Pride and Prejudice

Chiara Crivelli (no affiliation provided) has published Eighteenth - Century English Marriage and Inheritance Law in Pride and Prejudice. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines how Pride and Prejudice reflects the intersection of marriage, inheritance, and gender in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England, with a focus on the legal implications for women. The central research question is: “How does Pride and Prejudice engage with contemporary marriage and inheritance laws to reflect the economic and legal dependencies of women in this period?” Using a socio-legal historical approach, the paper explores the legal doctrines of coverture and entailment, tracing their historical development from the De Donis Conditionalibus clause in the Statute of Westminster (1285) to their application in Austen’s time. The analysis draws on legal scholarship, particularly J.H. Baker’s work on English property law, to examine how Austen’s treatment of inheritance laws—particularly entailments—shapes the financial prospects and autonomy of women in the novel. The paper is structured as follows: the first chapter provides a biographical and thematic overview of Austen’s work. The second chapter situates Pride and Prejudice within the social and legal context of Austen's England, focusing on class structure and gender norms. The third chapter explores the legal implications of marriage, particularly the doctrines of coverture and their impact on women’s legal identity. The fourth chapter focuses on inheritance law, specifically entailments, and their role in restricting women’s financial autonomy. Ultimately, this paper argues that Pride and Prejudice critiques the restrictive legal and social systems of its time, illustrating how marriage served as both a means of survival and a legal constraint for women.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

New From UVA Press: Melissa J Ganz: Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment @uvapress

Melissa J. Ganz, Associate Professor of English, Marquette University, has published Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (University of Virginia, 2019). Here is the abstract.

In eighteenth-century England, the institution of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists, legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates shaped English fiction in crucial and previously unrecognized ways and that novels, in turn, played a central role in the debates. Like many legal and social thinkers of their day, novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Fenwick, and Amelia Opie imagine marriage as a public institution subject to regulation by church and state rather than a private agreement between two free individuals. Through recurring scenes of infidelity, fraud, and coercion as well as experiments with narrative form, these writers show the practical and ethical problems that result when couples attempt to establish and dissolve unions simply by exchanging consent. Even as novelists seek to shore up the legal regulation of marriage, however, they contest the specific forms that these regulations take. In recovering novelists’ engagements with the nuptial controversies of the Enlightenment, Public Vows challenges longstanding accounts of domestic fiction as contributing to sharp divisions between public and private life and as supporting the traditional, patriarchal family. At the same time, the book counters received views of law and literature, highlighting fiction’s often simultaneous affirmations and critiques of legal authority.

 

Public Vows received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, University of Virginia, in 2018.

Kha on the Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock @tandfonline

Henry Kha has published The Spectacle of Divorce Law in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock in Law and Literature. Here is the abstract.

The article examines the way Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934) and A. P. Herbert's Holy Deadlock (1934) express popular dissent against the divorce laws of England in the 1930s. These novels satirized the legal process of obtaining a divorce as farcical and tainted by parties colluding to stage “hotel divorces” in order to satisfy the single-fault ground of adultery. This article argues that these novels helped to articulate widespread opposition towards the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which only allowed divorce to be granted for adultery alone. The writings also spurred parliamentary debate and ultimately paved the way forward for the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Herbert played a unique part in the campaign for divorce law reform. Both as a novelist and as a parliamentarian, Herbert composed legal satires and successfully introduced the Divorce Bill into the British Parliament respectively.

The full text is available via subscription. 

ICYMI: Christine Grogan, Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) @fdu_press @RLPGBooks @penn_state

ICYMI:

Christine Grogan, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Department of English, has published Father-Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Complex Trauma of the Wound and the Voiceless (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.

McAleavey on The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel

ICYMI: Maia McAleavey, Boston College, has published The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015) (Cambridge Studies in Nineteeth-Century Literature and Culture).

Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.

• The first extended study of the prevalent bigamy plot, filling an important gap in the history of the Victorian novel
• Revises the common view of the Victorian novel that links its narrative structure to courtship and marriage
• Provides an exhaustive appendix of nearly 300 novels featuring a bigamy plot and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels

Bailey On Marriage Law in Jane Austen's World

Martha Bailey, Queen's University Faculty of Law, is publishing The Marriage Law of Jane Austen's World in volume 36 of Persuasions On-line (Winter 2015). Here is the abstract.

Marriage is the central theme and conclusion of Jane Austen’s novels. But marriage in Regency England was a very different institution from what it is here and now, in large part because of changes in the law relating to marriage. Knowledge of the marriage law of Austen’s world gives a deeper understanding of her books. More importantly, the books give us a richer appreciation of how marriage laws structured the lives of men and women. Austen conveys the lived reality of those subject to early nineteenth century laws relating to the economic arrangements of marriage, pre-marital sex, the marriage of relatives, clandestine and underage marriage, divorce, and adulterine bastardy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.