ABSTRACT
This three-part chapter constellates under a title taken from a contemporary popular novel, felicitous for grouping together three of my own responses to the coming-of-age of feminist criticism. In the third of these, Nancy Price’s Sleeping with the Enemy will appear in its own right, and bring to our attention a very peculiar conjunction between reading between the lines and the social problem of wife beating. Each of my essays, however, deals in its own (I trust) eccentric way with the problem of male-female hostilities, and the extent to which these are acted out in different kinds of writing, sometimes but not always in the interests of truce or pacification. Here I consider John Milton’s pamphlets arguing for the introduction of legal divorce in England, concentrating on the first of his series, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in which the terrible idea of sleeping with the enemy is given all-too-concrete representation; since Milton’s own young wife, from whom he wished to be legally separated, belonged to a family on the opposite side of the English civil war.
