ABSTRACT
This chapter re-examines Henry (Ellen) Wood's representation of married life, discussing how she engages with wider debates on middle-class domestic ideals, while self-consciously redeploying narrative conventions. Romantic marriage indisputably remains a central theme and goal in nineteenth-century fiction. Wood produces marriage novels that tackle the idealisation of the dull suitor within a detailed analysis of married life. She symptomatically sensationalises separation, reminding the reader how scandalous and transgressive both informal separation and divorce remained in Victorian Britain. Wood's treatment of domestic violence and separation forms evidence of the anxiety, while exemplifying how a sensationalist evocation of marital breakdown can work as a moralistic narrative. Wood's novel self-consciously reverses readerly expectations of popular fiction about romance and marriage on three counts: in ejecting the seductive, adulterous lover; in substituting gambling and fraud as the seduction, which underscores the significance of finance; as well as in subordinating courtship to marriage as the main theme.
