Broken engagements : the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940

""Surveying three consecutive time periods - the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian and the post Victorian periods - and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, to expose the subtle ye t unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film."--Jacket."

"Broken engagements : the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940"@en
"Broken engagements : the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940"
"Broken engagements the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940"@en
"Broken engagements the action for breach of promise of marriage and the feminine ideal, 1800-1940"