In 1990, Lawrence Stone published a book called Road to Divorce. Bold, original, pungent and wide-ranging, it was at one level an attempt to convey the vagaries and varieties of matrimony in England from Tudor times to the Marriage Act of 1753, and the extreme difficulty and dirtress involved in legally separating from a spouse before the passage of the Divorce Act in 1857. At a deeper level however, and characteristically, Stone's purpose was far more ambitious.

LRB 22 September 1994 | PDF Download