ABSTRACT
Women writers over the century discovered the narrative possibilities of short fiction at the same time that they employed it as a vehicle to tell alternative stories about marriage. This chapter proposes that short fiction gave women writers of the nineteenth century particular freedom to explore the marriage question. Kate Chopin's 'The Story of an Hour' exemplifies how far the short story had developed over the course of the nineteenth century, in terms both of narrative innovation and of its explicit questioning of marriage. Two examples that provide interesting treatments of marriage are Maria Edgeworth's 'The Limerick Gloves' and Laetitia E. Landon's 'Sefton Church'. The theme of sexual relationships in marriage could receive much less coded treatment by the 1890s, and the writers who were most bold in its depiction tended to be those associated with the New Woman phenomenon, although they were often obliged to use non-mainstream publishers and magazines.
