Reviewed by Harriet
A few months after Pride and Prejudice was published, Jane Austen visited her brother Henry in London.
The opening words of Rory Muir’s book might lead the reader to assume that Austen was actually his subject. But not so. She certainly pops up in the chapters, providing useful examples of whatever point the author is making, but this is essentially a wide-ranging social history of the progress of matrimony in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His survey, drawn from diaries, letters, biography and fiction, is confined to what he calls the upper classes, which he qualifies as ‘anyone who might be plausibly regarded as a lady or gentleman…overwhelmingly white and Protestant’. Many of his subjects are indeed titled, or wealthy landowners, but some, like Austen herself, would have been considered middle class: soldiers and sailors, lawyers and clergy, even one couple who were a governess and a struggling manufacturer. However, fascinating though it would be to have more accounts of the lower levels of society, few if any of those kept diaries, although they do of course feature in fiction.
Quibbles apart, this is an entertaining and informative book, drawing attention to issues that no longer face people in relationships today. The biggest difference , of course, was that if two people were in love, there was no question of living together without marriage. But love, in the Regency period, was not a prerequisite for marriage, and some young women – though perhaps fewer than you might think – accepted proposals from men who they, or their families, thought would be suitable providers. And when a marriage failed, divorce was a very rare option: a man could divorce his wife for infidelity but not the other way round. Consequently there were some scandalous liaisons in which a couple who fell passionately in love left their partners and set up a life together. Circumstances often made life hard to bear even, perhaps especially, for devoted couples. Many husbands and wives were separated by the men’s professions: soldiers would be away at war, and soldiers at sea, often for months or even years at a time. Lawyers would be called to another part of the country on the circuit for six weeks twice a year. Conversely, clergymen were expected to stay in whatever remote part of the country they had ended up in, with no pleasurable trips to London, and their wives often found this difficult and taxing, as it entailed many visits to the unfortunate members of the parish. Essentially, once married, women did not have a life of their own.
Of course a couple might be in love but prevented from marrying by parental disapproval, so elopements to Gretna Green were relatively common, as Scottish law allowed young women to marry from the age of twelve and boys of fourteen to marry without parental consent. Less common were abductions, in which a young girl would be persuaded to run away with a man who made a promise of marriage which he had no intention of fulfilling. Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice was exceptionally lucky to have the financial pressure of her future brother-in-law to be available to persuade George Wickham to marry her and save her from what her family recognised as inevitable ruin.
Muir’s seventeen chapters follow the course of relationships from meeting, attraction and courtship through weddings and married life both early and late. There are chapters on unhappy marriages, on domestic violence and adultery, on widowhood and finally, growing old together. It’s difficult to escape the feeling at times that his examples and conclusions would hold as true today as in the era he is concerned with; ‘weddings were a time of heightened emotion for the bride, the groom and for their families’; ‘The ability to express affection and to apologise when the other was hurt were great assets to any couple’;, or ‘In most cases couples seem to have been eager to please each other – and to be pleased – in the early weeks of their marriage’. But overall Muir is seeking to disprove the commonly held view of the Regency era that upper-class society was exceptionally immoral and decadent. Most of his examples show marriages in which people either managed to stay happy or to put up with less than satisfactory partners, though of course – like today – there were plenty of men with mistresses.
So, don’t read this book hoping for detailed analysis of Austen’s novels, but do read it if you enjoy stories about the way human beings dealt with romantic attachments and their outcome more than two hundred years ago. There are illustrations, copious notes and a very full bibliography, and even a list of Dramatis Personae in case you get in a muddle with all the Lord and Ladies and lesser beings.
Harriet is one of the founders of Shiny and a co-editor.
Rory Muir, Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale University Press, 2025). 978-0300281071, 432pp., paperback.
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