ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on absent husbands and unpartnered wives in domestic tragedy. It explores how conduct literature and the more novel guides on merchant travel accounted for this domestic conundrum fostered by the expansion of trade and the intensification of men's local or internal travel in England. An inherently conservative genre, marriage guides act as though husbands are present even when they are absent. At the same time, also perhaps predictably, guides to business and travel of the time did little to accommodate home life, either textually or practically. Unpartnered wives might glean little concrete advice and no remedy for long-term spousal absence; for example, the Lawes dictates that they 'simply forbeare' remarriage. Absent husbands were an everyday reality in much of the country, visible and palpable as economic need and growing professional obligations required men's work as mariners, factors and merchants; or because they left homes, neighborhoods and villages in search of work.
