Marriage Quote by Dinah Sheridan

A good line like this doesn’t plead for sympathy; it smuggles the complaint in under a laugh. Dinah Sheridan takes what could be a grim life event and turns it into a clipped punchline: “eleven years later” lands like deadpan timing, the pause you can hear on a stage. The real sting is in the tag, “which is still not easy in England” - a sly national indictment delivered as casual observation, the kind of understatement English culture treats as good manners even when it’s weaponized.

Sheridan’s intent isn’t just to narrate a divorce. It’s to expose the institutional absurdity around it. “Grounds of cruelty” is legal language, cold and bureaucratic, and she uses it to show how the system forces private pain into a public, provable category. The subtext: cruelty wasn’t the scandal; needing to demonstrate it to the satisfaction of courts and social norms was. By framing the difficulty as a national trait (“in England”), she widens the target from one marriage to an entire culture that prized endurance, discretion, and appearances - especially for women whose reputations were currency.

Context matters: for much of the 20th century, English divorce law was famously restrictive, and “cruelty” was one of the few available keys out, often requiring humiliating evidence and performance. Coming from an actress, the line also hints at a bitter irony: the stage offers freedom to play any life, while real life demanded you stay in character far too long.