After Marriage in the Long Eighteenth Century: Introduction

Abstract

This chapter explores recent insights into understandings of the family structure, marriage laws and sexuality, foregrounding the book’s analyses of these social and legal contexts and accounts of experiences of the period after marriage and representations thereof in various media such as women’s magazines, novels, plays, paintings and letters. It discusses how a range of portrayals of the marital experience question the social practices concerning after marriage in distinct ways. It demonstrates the profitable contribution of the following interdisciplinary essays by examining how insights regarding social practices and laws are at play within the complexities surrounding the convention of marriage’s function as a narrative conclusion, probing the interface between the lived experience of marriage in the eighteenth century with its representation in a variety of cultural forms.