Customer Reviews

Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987

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I read this book when I was writing my disstertation for the University. I found it both competent, giving facts and details, and also entertainig. Extremely well-written it is a book that gives the reader a deep insight into British society and its customs.

Anyone intrigued but a little mystified by the behavior, romantic concerns, and subsequent motivations in matrimonial decisions, of characters penned by Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, the Brontes, and, indeed, authors clear through to Wilke Collins and Thomas Hardy, will find a world of enlightenment in the pages of Lawrence Stone's most worthy book.

Although this and, it must be noted, the two prior works that compose Stone's magnificant trilogy: Uncertain Unions and Broken Lives, are works of brilliant scholarship, they are never a dull read. For, from the whip-tight mind of Stone pours forth page after page of such flawlessly woven statistics, such brightly illuminated narration, that the darkest corner of the marital bedchambre of the past is shown in such stark and, sometimes, harrowing detail, that the only wonder is that anyone ever managed to imagine a "happily ever after" in the first place.

From the abduction of heiresses, the testimony of servants, and the gamble of the crim/con suite, all the way to the fabled Gretner's Green in Scotland, a map of such clarity and intrigue is laid out that one quite forgets that one is head down in scholarship. Rather, one finds one's self galloping headlong through the darkness of raging personal battles long ago fought, and won - or tragically lost - in a maze of thrashing laws and loop holes resembling, to the modern mind, nothing so much as the forest of Mirkwood. But, always and ever, Stone's brilliant torch leads one forward.

From the moment I picked them up, these books were my constant companions. Not the least bit of a legal turn of mind is required; Stone writes with such organization, clarity, and compulsion, that understanding of, and enlightenment to the motivations of 500 years of those who loved - and who lost - is inevitable.Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857

Well written and of Great interest to lawyers and all of those who strive to understand some of the underpinnings of our culture