Marriages are not made in heaven or hell, but somewhere in between. In this splendid anthology, Hilary Rubinstein draws on the wit and wisdom of over two thousand years to trace the course of a marriage through all its various stages. Moving from passionate or painful proposals to the delights or disasters of the big day, the book touches on sex, children, death, and divorce before reaching the calmer waters of contented old age. Among those describing their feelings about and experiences of this most universal of subjects are writers as diverse as Darwin and Kafka, Rabelais and Jane Austen, Pepys and Virginia Woolf.