Vengeful Susan

Linda Colley

  • Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753 by Lawrence Stone
    Oxford, 295 pp, £16.95, September 1992, ISBN 0 19 820253 9
  • Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660-1857 by Lawrence Stone
    Oxford, 373 pp, £16.95, June 1993, ISBN 0 19 820254 7

In 1990, Lawrence Stone published a book called Road to Divorce. Bold, original, pungent and wide-ranging, it was at one level an attempt to convey the vagaries and varieties of matrimony in England from Tudor times to the Marriage Act of 1753, and the extreme difficulty and dirtress involved in legally separating from a spouse before the passage of the Divorce Act in 1857. At a deeper level however, and characteristically, Stone’s purpose was far more ambitious.

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