A woman is married, in Scottish law, by a form of words she did not know were binding — and the man who spoke them is a brutal athlete who wants her only because she is now his property. Collins wrote this in 1870 against the marriage laws and against the cult of muscular sport, and both establishments howled; the Scottish irregular marriage was real law, and so was the fact that she had no remedy. Forty-four plates of Highland weather and rough sport by painters such as Horatio McCulloch and Richard Ansdell carry the novel's argument into the landscape where it was fought.
