Earlier this year when I was reading a book about women in early Mormonism (also by the author of The Midwife's Tale, as it happens) I was struck by how many of the women in the movement had either abandoned or been abandoned by a previous husband - without a legal divorce, but nonetheless everyone around them regarded their new marriages as valid and their children as legitimate.

I was wondering if that was of a piece with the general Mormon innovations about marriage, so it's interesting to hear that similar situations arose among non-Mormons in England - the common-law marriage when one or both partners have a previous marriage still on the books but moribund in actual fact.