Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (The University of Virginia Press) argues that novels influenced 18th-century debates in England on the institution of marriage that were formative for English fiction. Melissa J. Ganz ’94 suggests that novelists played a role in the public understanding of marriage as a legal institution of church and state through their narrative choices.