Romance's Rival ─ Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction

Romance's Rival 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.Romance's Rival recovers "familiar marriage," connecting it to the development of female subjectivity since the seventeenth century. It also undertakes a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Samuel Richardson through the twentieth century, rethinking what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts by Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and AnthonyTrollope, but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction by novelists such as Charlotte Yonge and Margaret Oliphant. Offering a feminist perspective that attempts to view the marriage plot from the woman's point of view,Romance's Rival 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. Romance's Rival 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.

Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her previous books includeNovel Craft: Fiction and the Victorian Domestic Handicraft, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England, andWomen and British Aestheticism.