Marriage Quote by Sarah Fielding

Marriage, in Sarah Fielding's line, lands not as romance but as regime change. "The loss of liberty" is blunt, almost legalistic, and that choice matters: she frames wifehood as a condition with predictable penalties, not a private emotional arrangement. The verb "must" does the heavy lifting. It's not that marriage might constrain her; it inevitably will. In a culture that sold matrimony as a woman's safest path to stability, Fielding snaps the sales pitch in half and names the cost.

The subtext is an indictment of how 18th-century English society laundered coercion into respectability. Under coverture, a married woman's property and legal identity were effectively absorbed by her husband. Fielding doesn't need to cite statutes; she translates a structural reality into visceral dread. "Attend" is a sly word too, implying a faithful companion: liberty's loss arrives with marriage the way a shadow follows a body. No villain required; the institution itself does the work.

"Horrible to my imagination" reads less like melodrama than an assertion of interior authority. If the law denies full personhood, the imagination becomes the last ungoverned territory. Fielding, a novelist attuned to psychology and moral education, uses that private faculty as a political sensor: her mind recoils because it can already picture the everyday humiliations - curtailed movement, narrowed choices, obligatory deference - that polite society prefers to keep offstage.

It also signals an early feminist realism: not "men are bad", but "the contract is rigged". In one sentence, Fielding turns the domestic ideal into a warning label.