Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Ruth Bloch, University of California, Los Angeles

Virginia scarcely partook in the liberalization of divorce law that elsewhere followed in the wake of the American Revolution. Only very slowly and unevenly did the commonwealth loosen its colonial restrictions on divorce in the period before the Civil War. This is the story told in this valuable and comprehensive study by Thomas E. Buckley of Virginia legislative divorce between 1786 and 1851. His research draws on extensive legal documents as well as property records, personal correspondence, newspapers, and other sources that provide context to the specific cases he covers. At once a social history of broken marriage and a legal history of the acceptable mechanisms and grounds for divorce, The Great Catastrophe of My Life ably proceeds at both the analytic level of generalization and the human level of poignant story telling.

1

Buckley concentrates on a distinct set of Virginians who sought escape from their marriages: those who submitted petitions asking for divorce to the state legislature. Divorce by permission of the legislature had long been the only official method of divorce available in Virginia, borrowed directly from the English tradition of parliamentary acts of divorce first established by King Henry VIII. In the early nineteenth century, as in colonial times, there were other routes to marital separation that fell short of formal divorce. County courts, for example, at times oversaw separation agreements that often included notarized statements by couples agreeing to dissolve their marriages and to distribute their children and assets. Still less official were decisions by one or both spouses to separate on their own, with deserters typically starting life anew in another location. These alternatives to formal divorce, however, failed to provide the legal right to remarry. Moreover, even as the courts gained primary jurisdiction over legal separations, their procedures were costly and time consuming compared to submitting a legislative petition. The legislature, at its discretion, might deny a petition, grant divorce with permission to remarry (occasionally attaching special conditions), or rule in favor of a more limited separation agreement that strictly prohibited future claims to property by a disgruntled former husband or wife. In addition, for some of the aggrieved individuals and families whom Buckley brings painfully to life, legislative divorce served as a personal vindication after a scandalous breakup, an opportunity to restore honor in a highly public and authoritative venue.

. . .