Romance's Rival

Abstract

The book argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we have assumed. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire—but they may, instead, insist on marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. It recovers “familiar marriage,” connecting it to the development of female subjectivity since the seventeenth century. A major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women’s popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that attempts to view the marriage plot from the woman’s point of view, the book inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, we have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels. The book asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women’s marital choices in Victorian fiction.

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