The Origins of the English Marriage Plot Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century

Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.

Introduction: historicising the English marriage plot; 1. Church, state and the public politics of marriage; 2. Clandestine marriage, commerce and the theatre; 3. The new fiction: Samuel Richardson and the Anglican wedding; 4. The Patriot Marriage plot: fielding, Shebbeare and Goldsmith; 5. Literary marriage plots: Burney, Austen and Gretna Green; Afterword.

Lisa O'Connell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. She is Vice-President of the Australia and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on eighteenth-century literature and culture as well as co-editing Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (2004).