Orange-flower wreaths or buds of deadly nightshade: matrimonial reform in the broken-marriage novels of Lady Charlotte Bury (1775-1861)

Abstract

As the first full-length critical work on Lady Charlotte Bury née Campbell (1775-1861), this project discredits the entrenched critical view, based upon the novelist’s association with Henry Colburn (1784-1855) and his stable of commercial silver-fork writers, that her fiction merely chronicles the shallow lifestyles of an exclusive, metropolitan elite. This thesis makes the case that Bury’s ground-breaking fiction progresses the revolutionary agenda of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and other late eighteenth-century proto-feminist writers who critiqued the gender injustice of matrimonial law as well as the cultural values which sanctioned it. In Self-Indulgence (1812), Conduct is Fate (1822) and The Divorced (1837)—published during a three-decade period which historians generally regard as a hiatus in women’s campaigns to improve their legal rights—Bury embeds her radical message within the context of contemporary political events and the conventions of the roman–à-clef to widen the reach and appeal of her novels. She also uses immersive narrative extensively as a device not only to increase women’s awareness of their legal vulnerability, but to establish the emergent genre of ‘divorce fiction’ that authors such as Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy would later adopt and progress. During this project, I demonstrate that Bury focuses not upon courtship, but on the injustices of coverture: a legal practice which applied to all marriages and worked to women’s detriment. Starting in the 1810s with Self-Indulgence, Bury corrects public misconceptions about illegal and bigamous marriage in society, uncovering abuses such as desertion, the violation of women’s property rights and the debarment of illegitimate children from inheriting parental wealth. Because there had been no improvement ten years later in women’s legal entitlements, her second novel, Conduct is Fate, centralises problems such as the indissolubility of matrimony. Here, I also discuss Bury’s connection to the early feminist orator Anna Doyle Wheeler (1780- 1848): one of several radical Unitarian campaigners who sought to harness progressive contemporary literature to their cause. My subsequent and final chapter focuses on the seventh novel Bury published with Colburn, The Divorced, in which she responds to the writer and women’s rights activist Harriet Taylor-Mill (1807-58). The chapter also illuminates ways in which The Divorced was shaped by high-profile infant custody battles involving society figures such as Caroline Norton (1808-77) and Wheeler’s daughter, Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1802-1882)—both of whom protested publicly after domestic violence and adultery, respectively, forced them out of their marital homes. Throughout the project, I draw on the historical and legal contexts of the early nineteenth century to chart the evolution of Bury’s pioneering ‘broken-marriage’ genre. In particular, I explore the marriage breakdown of Princess Caroline of Brunswick (1768-1821) and the Prince of Wales, then Regent (1762-1830); I also explain how Bury dramatises notorious criminal conversation cases of the 1820s and 30s and the seismic erosions of widowed and divorced women’s property rights which were passed into law between 1811 and 1833. Ultimately, the project redefines Bury’s body of work as matrimonial reform fiction and enriches our knowledge of nineteenth-century literature and the history of marriage law. As this thesis emphatically claims, Lady Charlotte Bury is one of the most influential and least understood women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record