Aka: contractual marriage isn’t as boring as it sounds
ayamartinseaver.substack.com
“He spoke of their engagement as though it were a betrothal, as betrothals used to be of yore; as though they were already in some sort married. Such betrothals were not made now-a-days.” (Trollope 24) Trollope wrote Can You Forgive Her? starting in 1863, six years after the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which created the first civil divorce courts and changed laws around married women’s property in England. Divorce was still scandalous and expensive but it no longer required an act of parliament. It’s important to realize that Trollope wrote his novel, which contains at least three marriage plots, at a time where marriage was changing. Alice Vavasor even references the changing state of marriage when she thinks about John Grey and how he imagines their marriage as a sort of old-fashioned serious betrothal. Was an engagement a solemn beginning to a covenant between two people or just the start of a legal relationship? In
Aka: contractual marriage isn’t as boring as it sounds
Aka: contractual marriage isn’t as boring as…
Aka: contractual marriage isn’t as boring as it sounds
“He spoke of their engagement as though it were a betrothal, as betrothals used to be of yore; as though they were already in some sort married. Such betrothals were not made now-a-days.” (Trollope 24) Trollope wrote Can You Forgive Her? starting in 1863, six years after the passage of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which created the first civil divorce courts and changed laws around married women’s property in England. Divorce was still scandalous and expensive but it no longer required an act of parliament. It’s important to realize that Trollope wrote his novel, which contains at least three marriage plots, at a time where marriage was changing. Alice Vavasor even references the changing state of marriage when she thinks about John Grey and how he imagines their marriage as a sort of old-fashioned serious betrothal. Was an engagement a solemn beginning to a covenant between two people or just the start of a legal relationship? In