| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion. By Thomas E. Buckley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv, 346 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2712-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5380-1.)

Historical literature on divorce in nineteenth-century America has been immeasurably enriched recently with the publication of works by Norma Basch (Framing American Divorce, 1999), Hendrik Hartog (Man & Wife in America, 2000), and now Thomas E. Buckley. Basch painted her history in broad brush-strokes, looking at divorce from varying perspectives—those of rule makers in the legislatures and courts, litigants testing the rules as they sought relief from unfortunate family circumstances, and purveyors of stories in popular American culture. Hartog, in a sprawling look at American families, charted the myriad ways in which marital partners separated—with and without legal sanction—and thereby defined the contents and limitations of marriage itself. Both authors focus mostly on family disarray in nonsouthern locales. Buckley clearly learned from the techniques of his prestigious predecessors. Finding himself with a rich collection of private legislative divorce bill files and accompanying judicial fact-finding proceedings, he undertook both perspectival and anecdotal approaches to his material, writing a first-rate work on early divorce in a southern state.

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