Over the last fifteen years, the new marriage studies, as exemplified by Talia Schaffer in Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (2016), has revivified analysis of the marriage plot. Scholars considering a broad swath of nineteenth-century fiction ostensibly dedicated only to making matches now routinely attend to a wider range of relationships and affinities among potential partners, their friends, and their families. While feminist and queer critics no longer take for granted the singular primacy of the heterosexual couple in the fiction of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, or Anthony Trollope, however, revisioning marriage in relation to other domains, especially the legal and the economic, can open up new lines of inquiry. By integrating three important strands of scholarship—on nineteenth-century laws of property, on the shifting economic ground occupied by nineteenth-century women, and on fiction that actively rethinks the meanings of marriage, family, and community—Jill Rappoport takes the new marriage studies to the next level in Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction.

Rappoport’s key insight has a specific historical provenance. She argues that in the period between the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which made divorce more readily available to some, and the two Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, changes in the status of both primogeniture and coverture had crucial implications for the culture and its fictions. The capacity for married or unmarried women to exert agency over property, Rappoport shows, generated a new site for cultural concern, in which women of means were construed as potentially robbing male heirs of that wealth. Austen’s fiction thus features as representing an earlier state of affairs in which primogeniture and coverture worked together more or less smoothly to keep women poor. With her husband’s property entailed on a distant male relation, Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice (1813), for example, unabashedly seeks husbands for her five daughters. At the higher end of the economic scale, her eventual son-in-law Darcy conceives the threat that wicked Wickham poses to his sister as simultaneously sexual and economic, given the wealth the steward’s son would gain should he succeed at marrying Georgiana. While primogeniture unfairly deprives the Bennet sisters of a share of the family holdings, coverture could also thus deliver an heiress’s fortune into unworthy hands. But when coverture loses force as an institution upon the advent of divorce, Rappoport establishes, “the claims of primogeniture began to appear as an argument against women’s rights to property; women’s claims to private wealth appear to clash with and detract from sons’ inheritance” (6). In the chapters that ensue, she goes on to demonstrate the wide-ranging effect of legal changes that undermined not only the fiction of marital oneness, but the economic underpinnings of patrilineal descent.

Rappoport’s scope exceeds this important clarification of how changes in marriage and property law first challenged men’s control over women’s wealth, then shifts the locus of concern to what women’s economic agency might do to norms of hereditary transmission. Indeed, in chapters on Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), a range of Trollope’s fiction from the 1860s and early 1870s, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), she invites us to consider myriad extralegal forms in which Victorian novels encoded or imagined the impact of such changes. Rethinking women not exclusively as objects to be exchanged—or willed away, like Bella Wilfer—Dickens represents them as collaborative agents participating in networks, such as the community of working people who support Betty Higden’s quest to keep what little she possesses for her own burial. The chapter on Wives and Daughters considers Darwinian models for their cooperative rather than competitive potential, reassessing sibling and stepsibling relationships in terms of how the novel’s chief characters share and share alike even while being pitted against one another. Wealthy unmarried female characters provide the focus for analyzing Trollope’s fiction, of which Rappoport argues that both “greed and generosity” (33) on their part challenge established lines of inheritance and transmission, when Lizzie Eustace, Lady Laura Standish, Alice Vavasor, and Madame Max Goesler seek to exert independent agency in the management, maintenance, or distribution of property.

As in the Trollope discussion, jewels figure largely in the final two chapters. The analysis of Daniel Deronda pivots on diamonds, with their presence forging a link between the two strands of the novel. The one is associated with Gwendolen, and her “theft” of her husband’s diamonds from his mistress’s son, while the other concerns Deronda, whose diamond ring forges the link to his paternal birthright via the medium of the Jewish pawnbroker: each stages a conflict between the rights of a wife and those of a son, a conflict resolved only through Grandcourt’s death and Daniel’s discovery of his true parentage. Jewels are perhaps more central to Rappoport’s reading of Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883) than to the novel itself, but here the eye she has turned on earlier works comes up with something very interesting indeed, in that the pearl necklace the heroine’s mother claims as her matrilineal property survives the wreck of the family fortunes, wrought by her husband’s malfeasance, to grace her daughter’s neck. The mother’s unreflective act of holding on to what she sees as hers creates a powerful emblem of the degree to which women may—or may not, as in the case of Hester’s Aunt Catherine—challenge conventional patriarchal practices. Here as elsewhere Rappoport contests the narrow focus on law as the sole arbiter of cultural change while also emphasizing continuity over time in forms of kin transmission that contested dominant patrilineal narratives.

Beyond its meticulous close readings, Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction has much to recommend it. Building on the wealth of recent scholarly work that has altered our understanding of Victorian women’s economic activity, challenging the still-dominant construction of the economic sphere as men’s exclusive domain, Rappoport rightly situates her intersectional study of the past in relation to ongoing conflicts around women’s unequal economic and legal status. The book is ably researched, elegantly written, and intervenes in a vibrant field.