About the Author

Melissa J. Ganz is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University.

Reviews

[W]ell-situated in both secondary and legal scholarship, before moving on to offer attractive, well-supported readings of Defoe, Richardson, Frances Burney, and Amelia Opie.... A particular strength of the book is Ganz's skill at tracing the edges of apparently radical attitudes. Thoughtful people are rarely in one mind about anything, let alone something so able to provoke contesting thoughts as marriage. It is a great strength of Ganz's study that she is so equably open to that.-- "SEL Studies in English Literature"

Ganz provocatively reimagines the relations between consent and coercion, law and equity, and public and private, showing how eighteenth-century writings offer startlingly prescient anticipations of contemporary problems.--Simon Stern, University of Toronto, editor of William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II: Of the Rights of Things

Melissa Ganz adds a crucial new dimension to our understanding of fictional marriage plots and to the legal debates with which they are intertwined. Engagingly written and impeccably researched, Public Vows makes a new case for the importance of fiction as a testing ground for the status of marriage law as a feminist concern.--Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University, author of The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830

This is a highly significant and valuable book. It should be required reading not just for students and academics studying the development of the court- ship/marriage novel but for anyone seeking to understand the institution of mar- riage, including how its legal and economic aspects adversely - and disproportionately - affected women. It also confirms the position of the novel as a locus of active participation in the debates that shaped the long eight- eenth century. A worthy winner of the Walker Cowen Prize and an indispensable work of scholarship.-- "Women's Writing"