800 Years of Women's Letters by Olga Kenyon Page B

him would account for his good behaviour; it was not in his power to behave ill! This will seem stupid to you, not knowing the people and the circumstances: but it had a great interest for me, and it set me moralising to think how much more miserable we should be than we are if we had our eyes opened to discern always true from make-believe. I have great sympathy with that prayer of the Ancient Mariner, ‘O let me be awake, my God, or let me sleep away!’ There is something else I long very much to tell you, but I dare not in a letter.
    I wish there were some photographic process by which one’s mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!
    A poor lady of my acquaintance is in great trouble; she has just lost a daughter, of whom I was very fond, under most painful circumstances, and I must go and see her. It makes my heart sick to see her. Her husband is a great scoundrel; he left his family, after tormenting them to death, and now he increases their trouble by all sorts of vexations, and it makes me mad to hear people coolly say, ‘I understand Mrs —— has a violent temper,’ as if a woman was to be steel and marble under the most unprovoked outrages! I wish I might say my say about matrimony. This is a tremendously long letter.
    God bless you, dear love. Take care of yourself, and write as soon as you can.
    Ever yours G.E.J.
    ED. A. IRELAND, SELECTION FROM THE LETTERS OF GERALDINE E. JEWSBURY TO JANE WELSH CARLYLE (1892)
A MARRIED WOMAN HAS NO LEGAL EXISTENCE
    In 1855, Caroline Norton, granddaughter of Sheridan and a fairly successful writer, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria on the Marriage and Divorce Bill. She had married the Honourable George Norton in 1827. He proved violent and mean, to the extent of refusing her access to their three children. She played a leading role in the agitation to reform the law, which made wives suffer so greatly when their husbands were unfaithful, cruel or unbalanced. This extract is taken from a lengthy, well-argued letter to the Queen, analysing skilfully the humiliations that many wives had to undergo. At last, in 1857, Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, which set up civil divorce courts.
    1855
    A married women in England has no legal existence .
    An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for ‘restitution of conjugal rights,’ but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge, and who may ‘harbour her,’ – as it is termed, – and carry her away by force, with or without the aid of the police.
    If the wife sue for separation for cruelty, it must be ‘cruelty that endangers life or limb,’ and if she has once forgiven, or, in legal phrase, ‘ condoned ’ his offences, she cannot plead them; though her past forgiveness only proves that she endured as long as endurance was possible.
    If her husband takes proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself. She has no means of proving the falsehood of his allegations. She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’. . . .
    If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband, a vinculo , however profligate he may be. No law court can divorce in England. A special Act of Parliament annulling the marriage is passed for each case. The House of Lords grants this almost as a matter of course to the husband, but not to the wife. In only four instances (two of which were cases of incest) the wife obtained a divorce to marry again.
    She cannot prosecute for a libel. Her husband must prosecute; and in cases of enmity and separation, of course she is without a remedy. . . .
    She cannot claim