In Bleak Houses, Lisa Surridge investigates the ways in which Victorian fiction responded to the debate that raged throughout much of the nineteenth century on the limits of patriarchal authority within the home. Surridge asserts that both the prominence and the prevalence of marital misconduct in Victorian novels resulted in large part from two landmark changes in the English court system: the 1828 Offenses against the Person Act, which allowed wives to bring assault charges against husbands in magistrates’ courts, and the 1857 Divorce Act, which made divorce accessible to the middle class. The resultant onslaught of detailed (and often lurid) newspaper accounts of these trials, Surridge argues, influenced Victorian novelists to open up the private world of marriage to public scrutiny.

While other studies, most notably Marlene Tromp's The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (2000), have examined marital violence in Victorian fiction, Surridge is careful to distinguish her work from that of her predecessors. In particular, Surridge questions Tromp's assertion that sensation fiction's depiction of wife abuse provided the primary literary inspiration for late Victorian marriage law reform. Instead, Surridge maintains that the sensation novel was only one of several genres—including realist fiction and newspaper journalism—that both influenced and were influenced by marriage law legislation throughout the nineteenth century.

Bleak Houses reflects a full range of Victorian authors’ attitudes toward wife abuse. The book's first two chapters explore Dickens's depictions of domestic assault in his early fiction and, in particular, Dickens's conflicted feelings about making private domestic conduct a matter of public consumption. While Dickens the social reformer certainly desires to expose and remedy the social evil of wife assault, Surridge observes that he is also loathe to penetrate the inner sanctum of the domestic hearth. Surridge shows how Dickens valorizes female characters like Nancy in Oliver Twist who either fail to resist the violence of husbands or lovers or who spurn the efforts of authorities to intervene on their behalf. This scenario of the passive, loyal wife or domestic partner enables Dickens to respect the privacy of the home while investigating and punishing wife assault.

In her analysis of Dombey and Son, Surridge further explores what happens when the Victorian middle-class ideal of what she terms the “closed” or private home is opened to public scrutiny as a consequence of domestic violence. Dombey's assault of his daughter Florence (which Surridge reads as a symbolic attack on his runaway wife Edith) represents a “failure of manhood” (55); when Florence flees her father's home and enters the public sphere, her bruised breast offers evidence of Dombey's inability to demonstrate self-control, a virtue that was especially praised in mid-century debates on proper masculine conduct. Surridge emphasizes that Dombey's masculinity and home, which quickly disintegrate following Florence's flight after the attack, are only restored when Florence returns to the Dombey household, thus reasserting the primacy of the private middle-class home.

In subsequent chapters, Surridge contrasts Dickens's idealization of the passive female response to male domestic abuse with the emphasis on women's active resistance and self-determination evident in novels written by female authors. In Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen Huntington's resolve to secure custody of her child and independence from her husband after she separates from him—rights not guaranteed by law in 1848, when the novel was written—constitutes her defiance of what Surridge calls “women's legal nonexistence” (101) within coverture, the legal doctrine that claimed that a wife's identity was subsumed in the identity of her husband.

Surridge also elucidates how George Eliot diverges from Dickens's portrayals of battered women. In “Janet's Repentance,” Janet Dempster leaves her abusive husband and regains self-respect within a network of communal support, unlike Florence Dombey, who only achieves happiness when she returns to the male-dominated household of her father. Surridge contends that, because wife abuse is not a private but rather a public concern in “Janet's Repentance,” Eliot, unlike Dickens, encourages the permeability of the middle-class home.

In other chapters, Surridge examines multiple dimensions of marital oppression in late Victorian fiction such as Mona Caird's implication in The Wing of Azrael that the Victorians’ assumption that a wife could not withdraw sexual consent constituted a violence inherent in the institution of marriage itself. Surridge contrasts Caird's bleak vision of Victorian marriage with the more comforting perspective present in Sherlock Holmes narratives such as The Hound of the Baskervilles, where violent husbands are shown as anomalies that are ultimately defeated by men such as Holmes who embody the Victorian model of the protective male.

Surridge's lucid prose and firm grasp of Victorian legislative history make Bleak Houses a truly enlightening study. One flaw of the book, however, lies in Surridge's decision to include works such as Trollope's He Knew He Was Right that contain psychological abuse but no physical violence toward wives. Along these lines, Dombey and Son also does not depict literal wife assault; Surridge makes the case that Florence is a surrogate for Dombey's wife Edith, but one cannot escape the reality that Dombey's blow falls upon his daughter, not his wife. Since all the other works Surridge examines feature physical violence toward wives, her chapters on He Knew He Was Right and Dombey and Son seem inconsistent. Surridge's choice to include novels where no physical violence transpires between husbands and wives seems even more puzzling when one considers her exclusion of Wuthering Heights, a novel that contains some of the most searing physical and emotional marital violence in all of Victorian fiction.

This concern aside, Bleak Houses is a valuable contribution to the study of wife abuse in Victorian fiction. Surridge's ultimate message is clear: despite overwhelming scrutiny of marriage and deviant husbands who abuse their position within the home, most Victorian texts that include wife assaults emphasize the reform, not the destruction, of marriage.