Their portrayal in fiction is hardly something to aspire to:
But if you really think about Victorian marriage plots, something doesn’t add up. Jane Eyre boasts one of the most appalling marriages in fiction, between Rochester and Bertha, before its happy ending. David Copperfield miscalculates drastically in his first marriage. The two main marriages in Eliot’s Middlemarch are disastrous. Catherine Earnshaw is hardly happy in her union with Edgar Linton. One could go on. In fact, as scholar Kelly Hager has recently noted, the “failed-marriage plot” is actually more common than the happy marriage one.
Even more intriguing, some of the happy marriages don’t look at all like the romantic love matches we expect today.
In fiction by Charlotte M. Yonge, who was wildly popular in the nineteenth century, characters seem to marry for companionship, mutual caretaking and affection, but never seem to feel anything like desire. (One of Yonge’s biographers even wondered if she knew how babies were made.) The odd thing is that these kinds of companionable matches exist everywhere in Victorian literature, once you start noticing them. For instance, David Copperfield ends up married to (ewww!) his foster-sister, and Fanny Price to her adoptive brother. And there is hardly a Victorian novel without cousin marriages – cousin marriages that seem to promise reliability, kindness, and safety, rather than passion.
The Dish 