Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

From time to time, society rethinks what its institutions mean. Despite what fundamentalists will tell you, this may include — indeed, almost invariably does include — the institution of marriage. Previous rethinks have involved the admissibility of polygamy (mostly in non-Western societies), the marriageable status of the religious, and the precise borders of incest. Some societies admit the concept of marrying a dead person, as in France and China. The possibility of a man’s marrying the sister of a deceased wife was as energetically opposed, during most of the 19th century in Britain, as the possibility of his marrying another man is now.

As we seem to be entering into another substantial reconsideration of the nature of marriage, it’s a good moment to return to a historic watershed. Kate Summerscale’s absorbing new book is a consideration of the moment of marriage’s dissolution; indeed, the forms of the law shifted during the case, which is the book’s subject, and under that case’s peculiar pressures.