"People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together." -- Catherine Morland defines matrimony for Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey.

    "Ay, you may abuse me as you please," said the good-natured old Lady; "you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of you." -- Mrs. Jennings addresses her son-in-law in Sense and Sensibility.

    There are also reasons why marriage was not a state to be entered into lightly. Marriage was almost always for life -- English divorce law during the pre-1857 period was a truly bizarre medieval holdover (readers of Charlotte Brontë´s Jane Eyre will remember that Mr. Rochester couldn't divorce his insane wife). Simplifying a bit almost the only grounds for divorce was the sexual infidelity of the wife; a husband who wished to divorce his wife for this reason had to get the permission of Parliament to sue for divorce trial was between the husband and the wife's alleged lover, with the wife herself more or less a bystander. All these finaglings cost quite a bit of money, so that only the rich could afford divorces. There was also the possibility of legal separations on grounds of cruelty, etc. (where neither spouse had the right to remarry), but the husband generally had absolute custody rights over any children, and could prevent the wife from seeing them at his whim.

    Here's a quote from Caroline Norton's English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854):

    "In Scotland, the property, personalty, and rights of the wife, are far more strictly protected than in England: and in divorce cases, she has the advantage over the English wife, in the fact than the first step is to inquire into the truth of the allegations against her. The English wife, in an action for "damages", brought as a first step towards divorce, by her husband against her lover, is not considered as a party in the suit; cannot have counsel; and can only benefit by such chance circumstances in her favour as belong to the defence made by the man against whom the action is laid. Lord Broughman, in 1838, mentioned a case in the House of Lords, in which not only the man proceeded against was not in truth the woman's lover, but not even an acquaintance; and the action was an agreed plot between him and the husband, who desired to be rid of his wife!"

    "I exulted as much as a fortune-hunter who has got an heiress into a post-chaise with him to set out for GretnaGreen." -- Boswell, Life of Johnson.

    Of course, any properly that a woman possessed before her marriage automatically becomes her husband's, unless it is "settled" on her; this leads to the "fortune-hunter" phenomenon: men who marry a woman only for the sake of the woman's fortune -- after the marriage, the woman and her money are legally in the husband's power (without any of the limitations of pre-nuptial legal "settlements", which the wife's family might have insisted upon if she had married with their approval) -- an example in Jane Austen Captain O'Brien's marriage to Emma Watson's aunt Turner in The Watsons. This is the reason why Wickham tries to elope with Georgiana Darcy, who has ?30.000. The other side of the same thing was the forced marriage of an heiress, to ensure that her money passes into family-approved hands; this appears in Jane Austen only in Colonel Brandon's story in Sense and Sensibility (which appears to have been drawn more from literature than from Jane Austen's observations of the life around her).
 
 
 
 

* Accomplishments / * Feminism in Jane Austen / * Marriage and the alternatives: the status of women / * Money and marriage / * "Settlements" / * Entail and inheritance / * Male Progeniture succession / * Legal motivation for entails / * Legal aspects of entails / * Attitudes to the entail in Pride and Prejudice / * "Sister" and "Brother"; "Alliance" / * Return