The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dress bought, the wedding tour planned, the wedding guests invited. The day came but not the bridegroom...
However, the real Miss Havishams didn't mope in faded wedding finery - they hired lawyers and struck the first 'no win, no fee' deals to sue for breach of promise.
From the 1790s right up to the 1960s, jilted women (and sometimes rejected male suitors) employed a range of tactics to bring false lovers to book. Denise Bates' book uncovers over 1,000 forgotten cases of women who found very different endings to their fictional counterpart.
Mary Elizabeth Smith forged evidence of a courtship to entrap an Earl
Catherine Kempshall shot the man who denied their engagement
Gladys Knowles was awarded a record £10,000 damages by a jury in 1890
Daisy Mons discreetly negotiated a £50,000 settlement from a Lord
Based on original research, this social history of breach of promise shows that when men behaved badly, hell had no fury like a woman scorned.
Breach of Promise to Marry investigates the social and cultural history of broken engagements between 1780-1970 and why the law allowed the person who had been jilted to claim damages from the person who had broken the engagement.
Denise has written a book based on her original research in contemporary newspapers and literature, to discover who were the real Miss Havishams, why they found different endings to their fictional counterparts and what their experiences reveal about social attitudes to broken engagements.
https://www.denisebates.co.uk/breach.html
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