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Genre: Nonfiction
NB: We have another guest review that will be right up the Bitchery’s alley, as it combines romance and historical research. Aw, yeah! This review is from Katherine M.
Katherine M. is a postdoctoral researcher of Victorian literature. She researches plots about awkward adolescents and their friend groups (some of which lends itself to interesting romance).
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Do you love the sexy stranger…or the boy next door? Thalia Schaffer’s Romance’s Rivals: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction tracks the history of the friends-to-lovers plot. This book will be interesting to those who wants to know about the history of marriage, how that history influences the popularity of certain storylines, and how standards of what’s romantic (or not) have changed in a century many of us love to read about. If you like to chew over Jane Austen and the Brontës, there’s much food for thought here.
Schaffer tracks the development of two types of heroes. She starts with the usual rake/romantic stranger. This hero appears in a phase of British history where men gain greater mobility through trade or the army. The stranger arrives suddenly and whisks the heroine away from the world she’s known. He is focused on the passion of consummation, and not necessarily marriage or emotional intimacy. As we know, the romantic stranger is sexy, but he’s also threatening. If the heroine’s whisked away, then where is she going to end up? What if she doesn’t want to go anywhere at all?
Schaffer’s much more interested in men who allow women to be fuller versions of themselves. Enter the “suitor of rational esteem”; this guy is sensible, but not sexy. The heroine can respect him, but cannot allow herself to love him (consider Elinor’s regulation of her feelings in Sense and Sensibility or Jane Eyre’s rejection of her cousin St. John Rivers). Far better is the familiar suitor.
The familiar suitor, when he becomes the hero, borrows from both the romantic stranger and the “suitor of rational esteem.” He not only provides intimacy and marriage, he reconnects the heroine into the world she desires, which could include access to a family, a community, a career.
Schaffer follows the familiar suitor into four different plots popular in Victorian literature. First, there are novels where a woman about to lose her home marries a wealthy neighbor (Pride and Prejudice, anyone?). Second, there are novels that show a woman recognizing her love for an attractive relative (usually a cousin or foster-sibling). This one is interesting, because Schaffer takes us through the ways our attitudes towards who counts as marriageable changed in the nineteenth century. Cousin marriage started off being very normal, so when and why did attitudes change? Third, Shaffer highlights the popularity of novels about disability in marriage and the sexy ethics of care. In this section, we learn that disability in the Victorian novel is very, very common and actually reinforces the sensuality and physical aspect of the relationship. Lastly, there is the section on “vocational marriage” and plots where women look for men who give them access to careers.
In each chapter, Schaffer considers when and why these storylines work – and when they don’t. But the last chapter is especially poignant in tracking failed happy endings. In the novels before the mid-century, many women work while looking for love (Jane Eyre is only one of many). However, Schaffer notes how the rise of liberal feminism between the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) and the Married Women’s Property Act (1870) paradoxically made certain types of romantic plots impossible. In order to make a legal case for women’s rights, authors wrote books where women couldn’t have it all. In order to advocate for women’s rights, heroines had to be portrayed as tragic victims of society, not as people who could make wrangle satisfying compromises. This section is really interesting, because it shows how George Eliot, for example, changed her source material so that her heroines couldn’t have it all. For example: Dinah, the kick-ass Methodist preacher in Adam Bede gives up her career when she marries, but she was based on Eliot’s aunt, who defied the 1803 ban on female preaching and went on speaking tours with her husband. That sounds like a novel waiting to be written!
This book is meticulously researched and engagingly written (for literary criticism, so there’s big doses of history if that’s what you like). It makes me want to read some more romance RIGHT NOW.
For some reason, the ebook is around $60, so be sure to check your local library!
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Thanks for telling us about this awesome book. In particular I find it fascinating when contemporaries change their told-truths about the world to fit a political agenda. With women, it’s endemic. Think how many successful and famous women of the past became invisible a generation later. Our own cultural biases warp our told history so sharply as women in particular.
Thank you! I’d love to read more reviews like this, another reason why I like this site. Often historical romances include too modern heroines to give them more agency or stick it to the patriarchy without realizing that women have been doing things they wanted even if it was against the odds more than their contemporaries would want to admit, and there are more fascinating stories to tell.
Ordinarily I’d be thrilled to hear about this book, but it’s not at my library, dammit.
I’m so distracted by this cover using the same art as D.L. Carter’s Ridiculous!
And the same cover as Phillyda and the Brotherhood of Philander by Ann Herendeen! There’s clearly an unmet need for pics of 2 men and a woman in period clothing.
I could not find this book at my local public library, but my University library had a copy. The Oxford University Press publisher and the price point to a scholarly researcher, so college and university libraries or interlibrary loan might be the best avenue for borrowing.