© British Association of Social Workers
Marriage in Literature
Kate Wilson is a lecturer in social work at Hull University. She also works on a sessional basis as a social worker with Humberside Social Services.
Anne Ridler is a poet and playwright and has also translated a number of libretti for Kent Opera Company and the English National Opera Company. Her New and Selected Poems was published last year by Faber and Faber.
Summary
The surface which marriages customarily present to the world is often misleading. Indeed, one of the central paradoxes in this most intimate of relationships is that although almost everybody has some personal and immediate experience of it, and although there is a vast array of social research that has looked at marriage from the outside, we do not in fact know much—other than from our personal experience—about marriage from the inside. As Mount (1982), in a review of the experience of marriage and the family in history, comments:
It is the essence of marriage that it is private and apart from the rest of society. Its ‘selfishness’ or ‘exclusiveness’ is not its undertone but its heart and soul (p. 188).