Breach of Promise - in Literature

In Literature

The social damage from receiving attention from a man is discussed in a passage from the 1801 novel Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, where an older woman is urging Miss Belinda Portman to give a suitor more time to attach her affections, though Belinda is worried that even by just passively accepting his attentions for a certain time, she might find herself "entangled, so as not to be able to retract", even "if it should not be in my power to love him at last":

"…after a certain time—after the world suspects that two people are engaged to each other, it is scarcely possible for the woman to recede: when they come within a certain distance, they are pressed to unite, by the irresistible force of external circumstances. A woman is too often reduced to this dilemma: either she must marry a man she does not love, or she must be blamed by the world—either she must sacrifice a portion of her reputation, or the whole of her happiness.… A young woman is not in this respect allowed sufficient time for freedom of deliberation."

Breach-of-promise actions were part of the standard stock-in-trade of comic writers of the 19th century (such as Charles Dickens in his Pickwick Papers, or Gilbert and Sullivan in Trial by Jury), but most middle- and upper-class families were reluctant to use them except in rather extreme circumstances (such as when a daughter became pregnant by a man who then refused to marry her), since they led to wide publicity being given to a scrutiny of intimate personal concerns, something which was strongly repugnant to the family feeling of the period (especially where young women were concerned).