Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature ed. by Duc Dau and Shale Preston (review)

PUBLICATION OF this collection coincides with the American Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage that inaugurates a sea change in the way families are legally formed in the United States. [...]Ellen Brinks’ essay will introduce to many of us Elizabeth Anna Hart’s overlooked girls’ novel The Runaway, which features wayward heroines (one, an unrepentant tomboy) who, unusually for this period of children’s literature, are not “tamed” or reabsorbed into domestic normativity but are allowed to nurture their queer relationship in the Scottish Highlands. Following a fairly conventional sketch of marriage history in the West, Schaffer points out that unlike the Victorian concept of romantic marriage, with its emphasis on choice and autonomy for the modern liberal subject, the older form of companionate marriage were made to benefit a couple’s larger social network. [...]in early nineteenth-century novels, cousin marriage represents an older relational idea of selfhood and a fast-becoming-obsolete idea of marriage as promoting affiliative networks rather than as a self-interested union forging privatized domestic units.