Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment

In eighteenth-century England, the institution of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists, legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates shaped English fiction in crucial and previously unrecognized ways and that novels, in turn, played a central role in the debates.

Like many legal and social thinkers of their day, novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney,...