Beyond

Gyp, daughter of a Sussex squire, marries a Swedish violinist for his music and finds she has married a man; the marriage will not end, because English law of the day did not much care what she wanted. Galsworthy was a barrister who never practised and met Joseph Conrad, then a ship's first mate, on a voyage home from Australia; this 1917 novel is his quietest attack on the divorce law, and the violin is not a symbol — it is the rival. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Millet to Munch, Tissot to Orpen, trace the marriage market and its discontents across Europe from 1859 to 1928.