Books, Arts & Manners: The Domestic Revolution

Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society, by Roderick Phillips (Cambridge, 816 pp., $39.50)

‘DIVORCE probably dates from the same time as marriage,” Voltaire once remarked. “I think, though, that marriage is a few weeks older.” The cynical notion that, whether we acknowledge it by divorce or not, marriages have always been prone to failure is one of several misconceptions corrected in Putting Asunder, by the Canadian historian Roderick Phillips. Having written books about divorce in New Zealand and divorce during the French Revolution, Phillips decided to tackle the big question: How did divorce become so common in the West?

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John Wauck

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Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society, by Roderick Phillips (Cambridge, 816 pp., $39.50)

‘DIVORCE probably dates from the same time as marriage,” Voltaire once remarked. “I think, though, that marriage is a few weeks older.” The cynical notion that, whether we acknowledge it by divorce or not, marriages have always been prone to failure is one of several misconceptions corrected in Putting Asunder, by the Canadian historian Roderick Phillips. Having written books about divorce in New Zealand and divorce during the French Revolution, Phillips decided to tackle the big question: How did divorce become so common in the West?