precedents and citing decisions
part II: bodice rehabilitation
Content warning: In this newsletter, I discuss marital rape laws and bodice rippers at length. Bodice rippers are romance novels that feature the heroine experiencing sexual violence at the hands of the male main character, who will eventually be in her consensual romantic partner.
I also am coming at this topic (as with everything), from an abolitionist perspective. To me, prison abolition for all means prison abolition for all--I do not include an exception in my abolition politics for violence or sexual harms. I believe more fervently, above just about anything else, that incarceration only does harm to individuals, communities and the world.
Also: sorry for the day’s delay--I was doing three things: buying Taylor Swift tickets, watching The Talented Mr. Ripley, and adding a section to this part of the newsletter about Lisa Kleypas, my historical romance Heidi Montag.
forced seduction and iffy consent
Proponents of the connection between marital rape laws and bodice ripper popularity connect the idea of the fantasy of female empowerment post-assault to women’s lives who lived under the threat of marital rape, who had no avenue for prosecution. In these books, when a woman is raped by the person who is going to eventually be her husband, the partner generally goes through some sort of process to earn back her consent and love. The theory connects that this fantasy is an escapism from the realities of marital rape, and that the need for that fantasy for many readers possibility dissipated when marital rape can be prosecuted.
But the plot of rape into marriage was not invented in the early 1970s, or even the first half of the 20th century. Instead, it seems almost any moment in the history of literature, particularly novels and romance novels, can be selected and there will be examples to be found that use rape-as-plot, particularly when we use our more contemporary expansive notions of what rape, to include non-violent forced sex and coercion.
Additionally, structural consent issues do not go away in romance novels, particularly historical romances, in the 21st century. The heroes are still men who have more legal rights than women, often are titled when their paramours are not, often own land that their partners are living on, are still written to be large and physically imposing.1 These are dynamics that do not preclude consent in a relationship ever, but are power dynamics that create relational conflict which makes the plot of the novel as they are worked through and considered by the couple. The goal of a romance novel is to be a romance novel, not to be didactic instructions on how to have an unproblematic romance.
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Chels is the smartest person I know on romance, and they go through the history of romance novels and this question very succinctly here! I admire their knowledge of the genre and ability to say something in less than 6000 words greatly.
precedents of seduction
If you are only looking at mainstream romance novels, bodice rippers from 1972 and later might be the first place you see explicit sex on the page or sexual assault between romantic characters. But assault to marriage plots existed in books before bodice rippers and I think it is reductive to assume that only sources of romance novels are from the lineage of Jane Austen2 to Georgette Heyer to the early (and clear) Harlequin family tree. After all, the book that led to constitutional law opening up to protect explicit sex in books was not a new publication, but Fanny Hill by John Cleland from 1749.3
Sarah MacLean has referenced bodice rippers as a place where rape victims get not die. And some of literature’s most famous sexual assault victims do die. The litany of Zeus’s victims who turn into non-human forms from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the hagiographies of many female saints, they resist or are victim to a rape before they die martyrs deaths.
But there were living rape and assault victims pre-bodice ripper literature, including some who married their assailants, and some rape victims who die in their respective books, who are not condemned by in their stories, but the heroes of them, albeit tragic. I think putting a firm line at The Flame and the Flower disconnects bodice rippers from many of their precedents, from psychological novels, social novels and adventure genre novels.
Perhaps the most famous rape victim in literature, at least in my mind, is Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 189. She is executed for killing her rapist/seducer, though Hardy makes it clear that Tess’s morality is not tied to her virginity. The book takes an ambiguous stance on the act, but Alec’s persistent actions prior to the encounter read as coercion. This act is subject to much debate among readers, though I imagine most modern readers land of the side of it being a rape. Hardy’s empathy towards Tess and insistence that Christian morality includes non-virginal woman suggest to me this ambiguity is not a Victorian oversight because modern definitions of rape are not available to him.
Instead, Hardy is exploring the more fruitful and narratively interesting realm of morality instead of legality. In an article that I highly recommend if you enjoy legal history in literature, William Davis argues that under Victorian law, Tess would have been almost an ideal complainant in a rape case and Hardy’s research for the novel, which we know from primary sources, including research notes, was focused on legal precedent. Davis also argues that “seduction has mainly moral implications, while rape has mainly legal ones. Hardy…wanted Tess’s sexuality and the matter of her purity to be considered in the minds of his readers rather than argued (with perhaps predictable results) in the fictional court of law.”4
By being unambiguous in the exact nature of Tess and Alec’s relationship, Hardy would have abandoned at least one project of the novel, where the reader is pushed to past notions of binary categories for good or bad women. Davis argues that Victorian readers would have understood, under their current legal schema, that both a criminal rape happened between Alec and Tess at the end of Phase the First5 and that it turns into what would be termed a seduction in the weeks that follow, where Tess repeatedly returns to Alec, despite reticence.
Tess is executed at the end of the book for killing Alec, who she is driven back to after her husband, Angel Clare, cannot forgive her for her past with Alec and thus abandons her. Both economic and emotional circumstances drive Tess back into a relationship with Alec.
Another heroine who is raped and dies is Clarissa from Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, 1748, who wastes away from the stress of protecting her virtue, which Richardson maintains she has despite being raped twice, precisely because she refuses to also be seduced by her assailant.
Clarissa refuses to prosecute her rapist, and this can be seen as Richardson opting for a morality based system opposed to a faulty legal system. But Ann Wagner argues the law in Clarissa is actually simultaneously “necessary and insufficient.”6 Richardson plays with legal language, using legal terms in their idiomatic every day usage, next to how they are used in legal parlance (Wagner points out the way the phrase “to do her justice” is used in the novel in reference to Clarissa: first in representing someone accurately, then in marrying her after a seduction, and then finally in reference to possibly taking her rapist to court).
When considering taking her rapist to court, Clarissa expressing anxiety about how rape victims are treated during trial. The form of the novel, letters primarily written by Lovelace and Clarissa, effectively make the reader the jury of Clarissa’s case, hearing both sides of testimony. And Clarissa is such a paragon of “virtue,” that despite initial attraction to Lovelace and being complicit in her flight from her parents’ house that leads to her assault, that a reader cannot blame Clarissa, even if a jury, without access to Clarissa’s blameless thoughts and Lovelace’s blameworthy thoughts, might.
Wagner argues that this is not a rejection of legal justice, but a fantastic alternative, particularly since Clarissa uses a legal document, her will, to insure public knowledge of the rape, both in terms of her innocence and Lovelace’s guilt, which leads to his death in a duel.
Clarissa is a particularly interesting precedent because it was published in multiple volumes and while waiting for the final set, readers expressed interest in the rake in the novel reforming and marrying Clarissa, asking Richardson to change the ending, which would then follow the traditional plot of the (not technically yet invented) bodice ripper. Richardson refused.
Both Tess and Clarissa7 do die at the end of their eponymous novels, but neither of their author condemns the women for being “unvirtuous,” but instead attempt to condemn something larger and more systemic--perhaps readers who align themselves with thinking that the rape sullies these heroines, but also existing legal systems that do not afford justice. A bodice ripper, to me, seems not a total rejection of this precedent, but a continuation of it. If we’re going to get to a happily ever after, some justice must be found or made, but similarly, it is going to be outside the extant legal system.
But rape does not always end in death and this did not start with the bodice ripper. Forced seduction leading to more consensual encounters existed in erotica and literature, without death at the end of the books either. The story of the Rape, or Abduction of the Sabine Women, is instrumental in the history of Rome and the marriage post-abduction leads to the Sabine women uniting the Sabines and the Romans as one culture. Pamela by Samuel Richardson, 1740, features a heroine who marries her almost-rapist after he has proposed in earnest and reconciled to the fact that she is lower-class. The Sheik8 by EM Hull, 1919, ends with a woman declaring her love for her assailant (though the rape takes place off page) and he reciprocating only after she threatens to kill herself with his gun. The Sheik is characterized as a “desert romance” and seems also in line with the adventure novels that spurned Woodiwiss to write The Flame and the Flower.
And the forced seduction trope continues in other media, Luke and Laura on General Hospital are possibly the most famous example of a forced seduction leading to marriage, though the show revisited the plot in the 1998 and landed on a more clear condemnation of the act. Even Blair and Chuck, an end-game couple on my preferred millennial soap, Gossip Girl, plays with the trope, by starting Blair and Chuck’s relationship with an out of character ask of consent, but after he has attempted to rape two of the other characters.
This trope of neither starts with bodice rippers nor ends with them and yet, the first bodice ripper, The Flame and the Flower from 1972, is the book that is brought up next to the marital rape theory, without any context of this pattern of narrative happening before or after the heyday of this subgenre. The Flame and the Flower is not a romance novel that I am clamoring to defend--I don’t think it is all that good, but this Book Riot article states: “The idea of consent wasn’t at the forefront of society, much less publishing,” when discussing The Flame and the Flower. This claim is weirdly framed to me and that misses what is actually happening in this book, that to me, is deeply concerned with consent.
the flame and the flower: a close-reading
As discussed in Part I, societal understanding of consent is not the same thing as the legal understanding of marital consent. In The Flame and the Flower, Heather is indeed raped by Brandon before they marry; he has confused her for a sex worker and does not realize that she is virgin, initially, and then rapes her twice more in his anger over her denying his request that she become his mistress. But she becomes pregnant after these assaults and her family forces him to marry, under threat of prosecution, not of the rape, but of piracy and crimes related to his shipping business.
Brandon and Heather talk about consent at length in The Flame and the Flower and Brandon earning Heather’s consent is actually a central concern of the book. I think other bodice rippers follow this pattern more successfully, but it is the literal plot.
In a scene where Brandon and Heather are talking about their new marriage and he is grabbing at her, he makes a comment about her seemingly having less resistance post-marriage: “You are more willing now, my love, than you were before. Does marriage make it so different?” But Heather responds: “What do I have to say in the matter? You will rape me as you did before, whether I struggle or not.” Heather specifically is not acting with less physical resistance to Brandon because of the marriage, but because she knows he can and will overpower her if he chooses, but she makes it clear that her consent has not been obtained simply because of their marriage.
Brandon does reference his “husband’s rights” in this conversation, but what he does not do is argue that now, because of the marriage, it could literally not be criminal rape. Heather not only names the first assault as rape, but uses that word to describe potential sex-without-consent post-marriage. Even Brandon, when he finally decides to assert his “marital rights” and he fears Heather won’t consent, he thinks to himself “Damn, it’s come to rape.” Whether Woodiwiss is historically accurate in Brandon’s understanding of the criminality of rape, here is a male character in 1972 (pre-removal of any marital rape exemptions in the United States), articulating that if he had sex with his wife without her consent, it would be rape.
This scene reveals neither a depicted turn-of-the-18th-century society, nor a United States in the 1970s, that cannot conceptualize that forced sex could happen in a marriage. It is just two historical moments where the forced sex within a marriage is not the crime of rape. Criminalization of the rape is the non-factor for Heather’s thinking, not her lack of consent. Instead, Brandon is threatened with imprisonment if he does not marry Heather, but not for rape, even though his initial assault of her would meet the standard for common-law rape, aided evidence-wise by her status as a virgin prior the encounter. Woodiwiss writes in the plot a way that Brandon could be incarcerated, even if not for the crime of rape, because of Heather’s family connection to the magistrate.
The lack of punishment for the rape is not really lamented. Heather and her family don’t want Brandon to go to prison as retribution for the rape--the threat of the piracy charges is based on falsities and manipulation of their social connections--what they really do want is for him to marry her so their child is legitimate and she has his financial and legal protection. Within the plot, given the option for something that might look like retributive justice, the choice is made by Heather’s family, and consented to by Heather, to instead aim at something more like restoration.
Even Heather, who does not relish the idea of being married to her rapist, notes that her child would be in a better position, legally, if they manage to get Brandon to marry her and she does want that. If Brandon were actually prosecuted for her rape or the false charges, Heather’s problems would not be solved, but continued--she would still be an unwed, teenage mother, with an illegitimate child and unsympathetic family. And Brandon would lose his financial ability to support her, which he had already offered before her pregnancy, offering a position as his mistress. Though reluctant to marry Heather, he does immediately agree to provide for her and the unborn child again when he learns the news of her pregnancy.
Heather’s ability to control what happens to Brandon in this moment, and the lack interest in Brandon actually going to prison, particularly for the sex crimes, is in dialogue with another change in the legal system being made in the second half of the twentieth century. This is when some prosecutors’ offices adopted policies for “no-drop prosecution.”9 These policies would commit them to prosecuting gendered violence whenever they have sufficient evidence, independent of the victims’ wishes. These policies were adopted because of a perception by anti-violence that gender violence was under prosecuted simply because of a lack of effort by prosecutors and police officers. Feminist lobbyists often encouraged this practice.
However, these policies can lead to a bevy of well-documented negative consequences for victims’, ranging from revictimization going through the court system to economic consequences if the victim is financially dependent on their abuser and their abuser loses income, to charges ranging from civil contempt to perjury being brought against the victim themselves.10 This is one example in the legal system where heroines in 18th and 19th century settings like Clarissa and Heather had more power to determine the means of justice available to them, even if the means that they choose might seem unsatisfactory to 21st century readers.
Heather seeks justice outside of a mandated prosecution. This depiction of justice may romanticize violence or be morally suspect to some readers, but if The Flame and the Flower and bodice rippers are supposedly about escapism and a fantasy of ideal justice, I think it is fair to consider other aspects of the justice system that could be seen as worth escaping. For Brandon, that's incarceration. For Heather, it’s a prosecution that would not undo any harm and in all likelihood would exacerbate it.
Within the actual text of the book, this is not a case of rape being condoned as non-harm by the legal system or the heroine, it is the case the legal system failing to provide a satisfactory solution to any of the harms suffered by Heather. Instead, in order to get her happily-ever-after, something extrajudicial and interpersonal must happen. It seems important in this discussion about how marital rape exemptions might have affected romance novel readers’ relationship with sexual assault on the page to point out that the novel that is so often mentioned alongside this theory, there is an option for imprisonment for the assailant and the heroine chooses a non-carceral option.
cold-hearted rake and evading the rip
I kept debating on whether I wanted to talk about Lisa Kleypas at all this topic, so this section is a little tacked on here. But every time I read a bodice ripper (I have read three now), I think about Cold-Hearted Rake by Lisa Kleypas. Cold-Hearted Rake is not a bodice ripper, though Kleypas has written these in the past. One of the things that keeps me interested in Kleypas, despite rolling my eyes at some of her gender politics, is her longevity in the genre and ability to write a Kleypas novel in 1993 that I recognize as Kleypas and one in 2020 that I could do the same, and shift those novels to fit the winds of historical romance taste.
Cold-Hearted Rake was published in 2015 and is the first of the Ravenels series and was the first Kleypas I read. The precipitating event of the series is Devon inheriting an estate, Eversby Priory, and a title, the Earl of Trenear, from a cousin. Up until this point, Devon and his brother were living in iniquity and disrepute, after growing up with abusive and distant parents.
With the house comes the widow of his cousin and his cousin's three sisters. The great question of the first third of the book is what is Devon going to do about the Priory, which is in disrepair and in great debt, and what is he going to do about the widow and the sisters. The sisters are now his legal wards, so he has some responsibility to pay for their housing, at the very least, but he has no legal duty to the widow, Kathleen.
Of course, Kathleen is the female main character and she and Devon fall in love. But within the structure of the book, the way Kleypas deals with problematizing questions of power between Kathleen and Devon is significantly less probing than bodice rippers I have read, and she relies heavily on Kathleen’s point of view chapters to assure the reader of Kathleen’s subjective consent.11
There are at least three sort of haunting questions of Kathleen and Devon’s relationship that Kathleen has anxiety about and each point that these questions are resolved quickly and without being given much narrative weight, despite being the questions that are driving the plot forward.
Firstly, Kathleen is deeply worried about Devon deciding to sell Eversby Priory, which was improperly entailed, so he is allowed to do this.12 Kathleen also has anxiety about guilt that she “killed” Theo--they argued before he rode a horse drunk and the horse threw him, causing to break his neck. She is afraid that Devon will blame her for his cousin’s death and punish her by kicking her out of the house for this. And lastly, Kathleen and Theo never consummated their marriage, so she fears that she is committing some sort of fraud by styling herself as Theo’s widow and staying in Eversby Priory at all because their marriage was not yet complete.
Their first moment of real intimacy happens when she chooses to disclose that she and Theo fought before his ride that led to his death after Devon retrieves Kathleen from the estate’s lands in a storm. Kathleen seems to truly blame herself for Theo’s death and expects blame from Devon as well--in this precarious position, where she already believes he might be kicking her out soon, Kathleen seems to have little reason to disclose this anxiety to anyone, much less the person whose mercy is needed to avoid the precarity.
But Kleypas characterizes this as a part of Devon’s seduction of Kathleen, something about him is just immediately worthy of disclosure and trust. And this happens again and again throughout the book. Devon’s behavior during this first disclosure edges right on references to non-consent scenes from bodice rippers--he even literally opens her bodice, though has the excuse that Kathleen has fainted, though when we flip to Devon’s POV, we learn that he had wanted to seduce her in that moment. This moment also leads to Devon’s internal decision to allow Kathleen to stay and to not sell the estate. There are good reasons to keep the estate, which Devon lists to his brother when he is aghast at the decision, but the causal chain is wanting to sell the estate--Kathleen being in his arms and disclosing private thoughts she has shared with no one--wanting to keep the estate.
Devon’s sexual fascination with a woman who he controls the fate of is right out of a bodice ripper plot, but he is never violent or strictly coercive with Kathleen. Kathleen is, in fact, surprised multiple times that Devon does not “attack” her lustfully. But while within Kathleen’s limited POV, she is surprised he is not launching himself at her, Devon is thinking about her in terms of possession. When he does first kiss her, it is after his “control begins to fray,” he is waiting for protestation and she surrenders “helplessly,” before she flees the scene.
All of this language around Devon and Kathleen’s interaction belies inequitable consent, but once the reader is back within Kathleen’s mind, we learn that what she is worried about is the propriety of wanting sex and the shame she feels for her desire of Devon, especially after being so recently widowed.
Before the second time Kathleen and Devon have sex,13 Kathleen is in a state of undress and Devon offers to help her with her overskirt, and she firmly says “No,” emphasis included in the original text. This feels like an allusion to the bodice rippers that Kleypas presumably grew up reading and eventually wrote herself. We get an emphatic no in a sex scene, but side steps the issues of sexual consent because the no is adjacent to the actual sex.
As Kathleen shirks away, Devon says “Kathleen…if you hold still, I will help you with your skirt. But if you run from me, you’re going to be caught…and I’ll make you come for me again,” referencing an earlier encounter. Kathleen bolts and Devon catches her. Is the difference between rape and seduction proper notice for his intent? Once he catches her, she blushes at the thought of their setting, a carriage house, so he gives her a choice, in the open or in a carriage. When she says nothing, he proceeds to start in the open, which prompts her to enter a carriage.
All of this, up until this point, matches beat for beat a forced seduction. The chase, the false choice, Devon’s internal monologue of not being able to control himself. But then, the next chapter, the reader gets to be inside Kathleen’s head and see that though she may be confused by her desires, she is enthusiastically consenting to this encounter.
What Kleypas never does is link the objective power dynamics between Devon and Kathleen that make up the plot of the novel, that he has the power to kick her out of her home, blame her for her husband’s death, or disavow her privileges as widow of the estate over fraud, that worry Kathleen at many different parts of the books, with her subjective anxieties about her consent of a relationship with Devon. Her anxieties about a sexual relationship with him are limited to 19th century prudishness and trauma from her first husband, they are interpersonal, rather than structural, and Devon is the solution to them, not the source of them.
Kleypas uses these objective, structural anxieties to move the relationship forward, having Kathleen and Devon discuss them before moments of intimacy, but how those might shape the contours of that intimacy is an abandoned question. My theory is that Kleypas recognized reader desire for the aesthetic markers and structural underpinnings of a bodice ripper and Cold-Hearted Rake is one of her attempts to write a bodice ripper for a market that has moved away from clear depictions of sexual assault.
But upon reading my first bodice ripper, To Have and to Hold, something immediately clicked that a book that characterized these first encounters between owner of a home and a woman whose right to be there was only at his pleasure as initially inherently non-consensual, even if it is not violent, was in some ways being more honest about the dynamic between these characters. What happens when Kleypas relies so heavily on Kathleen’s subjective consent is that the questions of objective consent remain unexplored and unresolved.
Kleypas is great at writing big grand gestures and dramatic moments that lead to intimacy; this is why I love so many of her books. But to say that these 21st century historical romances categorically are all more resolved on issues of consent than 20th century historical romance, when Kleypas’s real method is to ignore possible issues of consent, is inaccurate. Kleypas is just one example, but she is a huge author at a huge romance publisher, and anecdotally, I think she is the historical romance novelist I see discussed most widely in fan spaces.
Rape on the page did not begin with bodice rippers and neither did rape-to-marriage, or forced seduction plots. And to say that consent in 21st century romance novels is more resolved assumes a linear movement from problem to solution. The Flame and the Flower discusses consent in ways that go unexpressed in Cold-Hearted Rake. I mean to state this value neutrally, but to say that the genre has moved in one direction towards “unproblematic” consent is an oversimplification of the movement of the concerns of the genre.
The final part, examining To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney and its vision of justice will be out Friday.
I have read two (out of hundreds) historicals with “short” heroes and in one of them, the hero is still two inches taller than his eventual wife who is “tall for a woman.” The genre is full of the biggest men in London.
Though secondary characters are not without seductions of sorts in Austen. Eliza in Sense and Sensibility and Maria in Mansfield Park both are encouraged by male characters who are revealed as rakes to have sex, and underlying promises are not kept. And most famously, Wickham and Lydia abscond and are forced to marry. Wickham is 10 years older than Lydia, who is 15 at the time. Lydia never seems anything other than willing in the book, but the threat of sexual coercion is not totally lacking in in Jane Austen, even it is not matched with violence.
Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966). Memoirs did not really change the test of obscenity, but SCOTUS did rule that while Fanny Hill appealed to prurient interest and was patently offensive, they could not determine that it did have any redeeming social value, thus had First Amendment protection. This paved the way for the even more impactful case, Redrup v. New York, 386 U.S. 767 (1968), which included the famous “I know it when I see it” and basically ended any censorship on written materials in the United States—incredibly important in the history of romance novels.
William A. Davis “The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52, no. 2 (1997): 221–31, 228. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933908.
The novel is broken up in parts called Phases. I am not just being flowery!
Ann K. Wagner, “Sexual Assault in the Shadow of the Law: Character and Proof in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.” Law and Literature 25, no. 2 (2013): 311–26. https://doi.org/10.1525/lal.2013.25.2.311.
In reading about the legal history in Clarissa, which I have not read, I was struck by the similarities in parts of the plot of the film Promising Young Woman, though Promising Young Woman does rely on extant legal systems to dole out posthumous justice for the heroine.
The Sheik exists in a long tradition of Orientalist romances and relies on really racist and reductive stereotypes of Northern Africa. Not a recommendation!
This is a law review note from 1994 that considers the negative consequences of no-drop policies, but ultimately endorses them still. Angela Corsilles, No-Drop Policies in the Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases: Guarantee to Action or Dangerous Solution, 63 FORDHAM L. REV. 853 (1994). https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=3143&context=flr,
Negar Katirai, Retraumatized in Court, 62 Ariz. L. Rev. 81 (2020)
I am using the words subjectively and objectively here in a legal sense--we talk about objective or subjective standards and use both for different purposes in legal tests. An objective standard is one that the court is trying to ascertain what a reasonable person, viewing the facts, would conclude. Some standards allow for a subjective understanding, where the mind of the actor is considered. An example of objective standard is self-defense; it does not matter what the person who is using the defense thought about the danger to them, the court looks to a reasonable person in the same situation. An example of a subjective test is the state of mind elements in criminal law tests. A crime may require that a defendant acted negligently, recklessly, knowingly, or purposefully. Evidence of a person’s mindset is required for this, thought mindset may be shown by things other than testimony of thoughts.
I am not using these words as stand-ins for “truth.” It has more to do with the structure of the information in the book--subjective referring to information that is shared from the inner thoughts of a character, so only the character and reader after access to that state of mind evidence, and objective from behaviors that are externalized.
The legal construct that starts the conflict in Pride and Prejudice and has had readers asking for two centuries “why would you even do that to a house?” is provided with a counterexample here. The house is supposed to run with the title of Earl of Trenear, but because Devon’s cousin passed away so quickly after his inheritance, it was not re-entailed before Devon inherited. Why this happens had to do with the law against perpetuities, which I won’t get into, but it prevents entails from existing forever without a new heir opting in to this scheme.
Kleypas novels generally follow a very heteronormative, baseball metaphor, order of operations when it comes to sexual activity. I’m going by grown-up rules and just considering sexual encounters to be sex.