San Antonio College Library

"A young lady aspiring to a 'good' marriage in the nineteenth century had not only to be well-versed in the strict codes of etiquette considered essential in society circles; she was also expected to manage a large household, to dress correctly, to be a compliant partner in the marriage bed, and to provide with devotion and obedience for her husband's needs and comfort and further his career with the right social contacts. Rona Randall, drawing on...

"Academic study about marriage and courtship in the Victorian novel. It discusses works by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Margaret Oliphant, among others"--

Set in rural Wisconsin in 1909, Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting.

"This volume, the first full-length comparative study of the Brownings' poetry since the early twentieth century, examines the creative partnership of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning through a critical analysis of the poems written by this famous couple during the sixteen-year period of their friendship, courtship, and marriage. First attracted to each other by similarities in their poetry, the Brownings were both scholarly poets, and continually...

"Tells the story of a physician in 19th-century Sweden who deals with moral and love issues. The novel is about Dr. Tyko Gabriel Glas who is a respected physician in Stockholm. The story is told in the form of a diary and follows Doctor Glas as he struggles with depression. The antagonist is Reverend Gregorius, a morally corrupt clergyman. Gregorius' beautiful young wife confides in Dr. Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and asks for his...

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth-century western history. Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, bestselling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent Newport family: for thirteen years he lived a double life - as the celebrated white Clarence King and as James Todd, a black Pullman porter and steelworker. Unable to marry the black...

"What is the world-historical importance of Jane Austen? An old maid writes with the detachment of a god. Here, the stigmatized condition of a spinster; there, a writer's unequalled display of absolute, impersonal authority. In between, the secret work of Austen's style: to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she is." "For no Jane Austen could ever appear in Jane Austen. Amid happy wives and pathetic old maids,...

In nineteenth-century England, marriage between first cousins was both legally permitted and perfectly acceptable. After mid-century, laws did not explicitly penalize sexual relationships between parents and children, between siblings, or between grandparents and grandchildren. But for a widower to marry his deceased wife's sister was illegal on the grounds that it constituted incest. That these laws and the mores they reflect strike us today as wrongheaded...