Marriage and Divorce in Jane Austen’s Novels

By Devoney Looser, Arizona State University

One enduring question that Jane Austen’s fiction opens up for readers is precisely what an ideal equal marriage might look like, for individuals and families. No matter which class you came from, an 18th-century marriage brought with it a set of legal strictures. The laws and customs for marriage in Austen’s day made pursuing equality in matrimony a profound challenge, and her fiction shows a keen awareness of that fact.

Lord Hardwicke’s Act

Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, also known as the Marriage Act of 1753, tried to curb the practice of secret, or clandestine, and irregular marriages. It sought to do away with fortune-hunting men’s manipulating, or even kidnapping, young heiresses, in order to marry them for their money.

After 1753, these runaway marriages became illegal. The act also stipulated that all marriages needed to be announced publicly, in advance, through so-called banns, for several weeks before the anticipated wedding day.

And, thanks to Lord Hardwicke’s Act, marriages were supposed to be performed during the day, by a regular clergyman, in a church or chapel, and then recorded in parish registers.

Most importantly, the act required parental permission to marry for anyone under age 21. It gave families far more control over young couples.

Work-around for the Act

There were legal ways around the rules. One way was used by the extremely wealthy: marriage by special license, which gave couples the right to marry as they chose, without banns.

Purchasing a special license cost as much as most middle-class people made for doing six months of work. Couples had to apply for it from the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the rarest and most elite route to marrying in the Church of England. Mrs. Bennet fantasizes that Elizabeth might get married to Mr. Darcy by special license in Pride and Prejudice.

Gretna Green Marriage

Another way to get around the law was for a couple from England to elope to Scotland and get married according to its comparatively looser laws. Gretna Green is a village just across the English border in Scotland. English couples who couldn’t gain parental permission, or who were under 21, might head to Scotland to get married. The Scottish marriage was legally recognized in England.

However, Gretna Green marriage was far more common in fiction than in life. Traveling to Gretna Green was expensive and time-consuming. When, in Pride and Prejudice, Lydia Bennet goes missing from Brighton with Wickham, the Bennet family desperately hopes that the couple has gone to Gretna Green, because the alternative is that Lydia is living in sin as Wickham’s mistress.

This article comes directly from content in the video series The Life and Works of Jane Austen. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Marriage: Not a Personal Choice

We later learn that a Gretna Green marriage is what Lydia had been led to expect but not what Wickham intended. His intentions would have ruined Lydia’s life. She could be cast out of polite society, and her being cast out would have affected others, including the marriage prospects of her sisters. This drives home the point: rules for romance and marriage weren’t just personal choices. They were family imperatives.

Had Lydia’s situation not been patched up, her future would have been dark. We get a glimpse of it in the downward spiral of Sense and Sensibility’s Eliza Brandon after her marriage ends in divorce.

The Rules for Divorce

Divorce was made possible by King Henry VIII, under his 1534 establishment of the Church of England, which he formed, in part, because the Catholic Church didn’t allow him to divorce.

Thereafter, powerful, wealthy Englishmen could bring suit to divorce their wives, if they could prove a cause, such as adultery. But wives couldn’t divorce husbands for that reason. The double standard was cruel.

It was possible for a wife to sue for divorce if she could prove adultery and physical cruelty. This, too, was very rare. A separation was more feasible. A wife was unlikely to have the independent financial means to sue for divorce or the power to win one.

Legally speaking, divorce strictures also dictated that, after divorce, custody of the children was automatically considered the father’s right. That put a damper on women’s motivations, too. In this era, an average of three divorces per year were granted in Britain.

Divorce in Austen’s Novels

In Mansfield Park, Maria Rushworth was divorced by her newly wealthy husband after she temporarily ran off with the rakish Henry Crawford. We’re told that, “Mr. Rushworth had no difficulty in procuring a divorce.”

But this is a line that glosses over what would have been the realities in any real-world scenario.

A man in Rushworth’s situation would have had to endure scandalous press coverage. Accounts of the suit and reports of the witnesses would have been in the newspapers.

A man in Rushworth’s situation may also have sued his wife’s lover for ‘criminal conversation’, meaning adultery—and sought financial damages. The husband would in effect be arguing that he’d been denied his ‘property rights’ over his wife’s body by her lover, if he could call in witnesses to give evidence proving her infidelity.

Femme Covert

What’s important to remember is that wives became their husbands’ property upon marriage. This fell under what was called femme covert or coverture, which is French for covered. By law, the husband and wife became one—and that one was the husband. He covered her.

This doesn’t mean he always made decisions in her interest, which is why choosing a marriage partner was so important, especially for a woman.

Austen’s novels present a vision of marriage that centered on a couple’s, and especially on a heroine’s, pursuit of happiness. In the context of her own day, that was forward-thinking. It was an imagining an equality of love and intimacy in the institution of marriage that then had little gender equality of any sort under the law.

Common Questions about Marriage and Divorce in Jane Austen’s Novels

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