This is a bold and original book. Frances E. Dolan, a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, argues that early modern ideas about marriage have a powerful legacy for marriages today. She shows how the Biblical notion that marriage was a union of “one flesh” between husband and wife and the legal theory of coverture, whereby a wife's identity became subsumed by her husband’s, were central to early modern understandings of married life. Since the seventeenth century, the persistence of these ways of thinking about marriage, alongside the continuing support for patriarchal authority, means that marriage is an “economy of scarcity in which there is only room for one full person” (3). When conflicts arise in marriage, as they are bound to do in such an arrangement, Dolan argues that they can only be resolved through the use of violence, actual or imagined, in which one spouse assumes domination over another, or even eliminates the other through murder and death.

To prove the continuity of these ideas about marriage, Dolan ranges far from the early modern texts upon which she based her previous work, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994). She examines twentieth-century marriage advice books by evangelical preachers, recent Hollywood films, and historical novels about Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn. Certainly, the comparison of seventeenth- and twentieth-century marriage advice books is fascinating and reveals the long-term view that, when problems in marriage arise, they are best settled by wifely submission. The assertion of separate female identity in marriage remains problematic to marital harmony according to generations of advice book writers. Similarly, by drawing attention to the contrasts and continuities of attitudes toward wives who kill their husbands in self-defense, and after years of violence, Dolan demonstrates how such actions should be interpreted and understood. Yet the sections of this book that will be of most value to historians are those where Dolan sticks to the sources and time periods that are familiar to her. Her case studies of Lady Eleanor Davies Douglas, Anne Wentworth, and Abigail Bailey illuminate how religious beliefs provided both comfort and strength to early modern married women, and her discussion of the households of William Byrd and Samuel Pepys furthers our understanding of how wives themselves could exercise violence over their domestic subordinates.

Dolan is keenly aware of how the legal, social, and economic context of marriage has changed over the last three centuries, and she makes important points about the differences between American and English cultures. But she remains convinced that a line can be drawn between the early modern past and the present. There are striking similarities, which this book highlights. The nineteenth century, however, is a blind spot in Dolan's analysis. Surely the changes in property laws for married women that overturned the theory of coverture, reforms in divorce laws, and the enabling effects of education had an impact on how marriage was conceived? Condemnation of marital violence, and a shift of critical focus to the murderous husband rather than wife, as Martin Wiener has argued, altered the ways in which violence in marriage was imagined and shaped responses. Frustratingly, however, in this case, as so often in this book, Dolan leaves discussion of difference in opinion to her endnotes. It would have been far more helpful to her argument if she had been able tease out and explore her ideas in the main text, instead of leaving this to the endnotes that make up more than fifty pages at the end of the book. Determination to find continuity also leads Dolan to make some awkward comparisons, such as that between domestic servants in early modern households and hired help in twentieth-century ones. Since many more households in the seventeenth century would have employed live-in domestic servants than today, and because a key problem in the current employment of these workers is that they are often immigrants, the comparison seems inappropriate. A more fruitful line of enquiry might have been to examine in both periods women's “domestic mastery” over their children, as debates about the legitimacy of smacking children see no sign of being settled. Early in the book, Dolan asks the question of marriage, “Why are we still telling the same stories even after extraordinary social changes?” (18). While Dolan has drawn our attention to some important continuities, it is our task to try to answer this vital question.