View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Columbia University Academic Commons Contracting Female Marriage in Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? Review by: SHARON MARCUS Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 60, No. 3 (December 2005), pp. 291-325 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2005.60.3.291 . Accessed: 20/02/2013 16:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Nineteenth-Century Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:42:31 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Contracting Female Marriage in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? SHARON MARCUS ∞s one of literature’s most assiduous and complacent manufacturers of mar- riage plots, Anthony Trollope seems a perverse choice for inclu- sion in a discussion of lesbians and Victorian literary aesthetics, plausible only as a figure of that conjunction’s implausibility. We know the routine: marriage is the enemy of lesbian desire, and realist novels can represent passion between women only as a subversion of the natural, social, and aesthetic order upheld by marriage.