Lacerated feelings

In 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage.

Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law uses court records and newspaper reports to tell the history of nearly one thousand cases of breach of promise. She unpacks the ‘lacerated feelings’, the gifts, the gossip, the letters and poems of the couples whose relationship led them not to the altar but to the courtroom. There, to a captive audience, they told their tales of love and loss, seduction and betrayal, deception and desperation.

In more than 400 pages, Simmonds offers a provocative and compelling history of the ‘texture, language and politics of romance’. Courting offers readers a history of emotions, romantic material culture, courtship, and dating, as well as insight into the historical pathologisation of love, the rise of the counsellor, and the patriarchal hue of the Australian legal system. It does so through ten case studies from colonial Sydney to early-nineteenth-century Jamaica, Paris in 1848, 1850s Bathurst, late-nineteenth-century Hong Kong, the ‘Syrian Colony’ in Redfern in the 1890s, the pearling towns of Broome in the early 1900s, and depression-era Perth. Simmonds lingers upon the twists and turns of each case, and offers nuanced arguments about the role of location, race, class, and gender in love, especially when subject to the law.