Unwritten Stories: Recovering and Writing Women’s Legal History

In November 2024, I published the monograph Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales: ‘For Wives Alone’, which was the result of a posthumous partnership with my co-author, Professor Olive Anderson. This chapter explores the development of our relationship, and the moral, ethical, and practical challenges I encountered. I argue that such (albeit unusual) collaborations carry particular importance for those working on the legal histories of individuals and groups who routinely fall outside mainstream study, in this case married women. The chapter also demonstrates that the act of recovering lost scholarship, and its subsequent publication, can be in itself an exercise in feminist historical practice....