Reflections upon Marriage

Summary

Note on the Text

The Reflections, published first in 1700, the prefatory Advertisement suggests, were occasioned by a book which ‘came but late to hand’, undoubtedly translations of the proceedings of the famous Mazarin divorce case mentioned in Astell's subtitle. In the opening sentences of the first edition (1700, p. 1) she declares: ‘Curiosity … having induced me to read the Account of an unhappy Marriage, I thought an Afternoon would not be quite thrown away in pursuing such Reflections as it occasioned.’ This ingenuous beginning gives little hint of the inflammatory material to come. True, in the Advertisement, the anonymous author, as if to absolve herself, declares she has ‘no other Design than to Correct some Abuses, which are not the less because Power and Prescription seem to Authorize them’. On the first page of the fourth edition, Astell added a further protest: ‘I am so far from designing a Satire upon Marriage, as some pretend, either unkindly or ignorantly, through want of Reflection in that Sense wherein I use the Word’ (1730, pp. 1–2). But a satire of the manners and mores governing early eighteenth-century marriage was certainly what she had produced, and the Mazarin divorce was no more than a convenient peg to hang it on.