The question posed by Narrating Marriage is an intriguing one: is it possible to narrate marriage, to construct a novel in which the married life of two persons is central to the plot—indeed, actually constitutes the plot? So many novels rely on the tensions, uncertainties, and dilemmas of courtship for their narrative drive, but what is left once the knot is tied and the parties are happily (one hopes) united? Can the mere experience of day-to-day marriage provide sufficient interest to sustain the reader?

The lack of narrative drive within marriage was less of a problem for the authors of eighteenth-century advice books than for novelists, and chapter 1 contains an interesting overview of the advice given to husbands and wives on both sides of the Channel, highlighting the differences in such advice (such as the greater explicitness of French works on sexual matters). The authors of such works did, however, recognize that repetition and familiarity might pose a problem for the parties themselves and advised them how to combat the boredom that might result. Togetherness, it was recognized, was both an ideal and a challenge to be negotiated.

Some authors did attempt to create narrative within ongoing marriages, and chapter 2 examines two key examples, Richardson’s Pamela 2 and Rousseau’s The New Heloise. The marriages therein depicted are, however, very different in kind—the first being based on attraction and the second on suitability—and the strategies adopted by the respective parties are equally dissimilar, which renders difficult any crosscultural comparisons between the two. A richer account might have been provided by including other novels that incorporated married life into the narrative, such as Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple: Volume the Last (1753), which charted the vicissitudes of the hero and his family.

Contented marriages may be more difficult for novelists to depict than unhappy ones. One does not need to agree with Tolstoy’s claim that all happy families are the same to recognize that marital problems may provide a potent source of inspiration for the novelist, particularly at a time when divorce was out of the reach of most. There are accordingly chapters on “disruptive wives” (although the inclusion of Anna Howe as an example is rather odd, given that it is her resistance to matrimony that is discussed here), on wife abuse (less common in literature than in life, one suspects), and on the ménage à trois (possibly more common in literature than in real life, the exceptional arrangements such as those in the aristocratic Devonshire household hardly being the norm). It might have been interesting to contrast the depictions of wife abuse in fiction with the exposés of such abuse published by some of the survivors and to look more closely at the protection that the law did afford against abuse. Then as now, the extent of abuse within relationships does not simply reflect what the law allows but rather what any given individual will suffer before seeking the assistance of the law.

There is much discussion of the role of the law and the extent to which the legal system condoned bad behavior within marriage. The legal reader will spot a few errors in the author’s statement of the law. For example, divorce by act of Parliament was available only if one’s spouse had committed adultery (cf. the claim on 21); life-threatening cruelty, by contrast, justified only a divorce a mensa et thoro (in modern parlance, a judicial separation that allowed the parties to live separately but did not permit either to remarry). Roulston also misleadingly claims that the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 invalidated “any marriage of a minor without the written consent of parents or guardians” (8–9); the act, however, did not demand that such consent be written, and marriages by banns (which accounted for the vast majority of marriages in eighteenth-century England) could go ahead unless parental dissent had been expressly stated. The many minors who were in employment and living away from the parental home could therefore quite validly marry by banns without parental knowledge or consent (see further Rebecca Probert, Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment [Cambridge University Press, 2009]). Included here also is the familiar claim that a husband could “legitimately” beat his wife with a rod no thicker than his thumb, despite Doggett’s clear demonstration that this was a myth (Maeve Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992], 7).

For a book that takes the importance of narrative as one of its central themes, there is a surprising lack of narrative drive. Roulston’s style tends to be discursive and digressive. This said, there is much of interest in the analysis of individual novels, and the question posed is one that continues to have resonances for both law and literature today.