Professor Ann Heilmann, Cardiff University, will deliver a lecture
"Victorian Body Politics, Neo-Victorian Body Poetics:
The Contested Body of the Wife in Mid-Victorian Divorce Trials."
This lecture focuses on the transgressive body of the Victorian wife and investigates this material body’s textual inflections in Victorian law and contemporary literature. The main body of the lecture is concerned with three scandalous court cases at a crucial moment of mid-Victorian social transformation: the passing in 1857 of the Matrimonial Causes Act that introduced civil divorce proceedings into English law.
