Wedlock Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Women and Botany and our BookBrowse Review of Wedlock.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

Questions for Discussion

1. Mary Eleanor Bowes was brought up by her father to be a self-confident, ambitious, and clever girl. Thanks to him she enjoyed an education only normally provided for the sons of aristocratic families and through his wealth she enjoyed a pampered, privileged youth. Was this upbringing and education her downfall? Did it make her a poor judge of character, naively assuming that those who pandered to her needs had genuine affection for her? Or was it her final strength, which gave her the self-belief to escape and fight back against her bullying second husband?
2. Mary Eleanor married her first husband, the ninth earl, with romantic expectations of a loving, harmonious marriage. She was just 16 when she became engaged and had led a largely closeted life. Steeped in romantic fiction, she was captivated, she said, by his "beauty" and a "vision" in which he appeared to her (page 42). He was older, sexually experienced, and worldly wise, having enjoyed a tempestuous affair with an Italian contessa (page 73). Was their marriage doomed from the start? Whose fault was it that the marriage failed and Mary ultimately sought affection in an affair? Did you feel any sympathy toward the earl? What role did the earl's brother, Thomas Lyon, play in the relationship and was the two brothers' closeness perhaps a factor in the failure of Mary and the earl's marriage?
3. Mary Eleanor herself confessed she was not fond of her three sons although later in life she tried to patch up her relationship with them. Was her initial distance from them an inevitable result of customs in eighteenth-century wealthy families? The children were wet-nursed, looked after by nursemaids and governesses, then sent away to boarding school. Was it perhaps a flaw in Mary's personality or a result of her own pampered upbringing?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Three Rivers. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.