By Roselyn Fauth
While learning about William Larnach, of Dunedin's Larnach castle, I noticed it mentioned that he married three times after losing his first two wives, and that he was able to do so because of the law at the time. Able was and interesting word... Able suggests permission. so here is my history hunt to understand why made him able to marry his widows wife... It wasn't until a history tour around a Dunedin cemetery that the host Gregor explained to me the legal framework that allowed people to move forward. I wanted to understand what those laws were, and what they meant, particularly for women...
Was remarriage unusual?
At first, I assumed that marrying multiple times must have been exceptional. It wasn’t.
In the nineteenth century, remarriage after the death of a spouse was common, particularly for men. Maternal mortality was high. Many women died young, often from childbirth or illness, leaving children behind. Widowers were socially and economically expected to remarry, and often to do so quickly. There was no legal limit on how many times a man could marry, provided each marriage ended through death and did not fall within prohibited relationships.
So, while through my lived experience I believe marriage was personal. But now I realised, it was practical. It delivered respectability, legitimacy for children, and clear arrangements for property and inheritance.
For men, the law made remarriage relatively straightforward. For women... marriage could change everything.
Under nineteenth century English common law (which strongly influenced colonial New Zealand) marriage triggered the doctrine of coverture. A married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into that of her husband. She could not independently own property, control her earnings, or enter contracts in her own name. If her husband died, that changed. Widowhood restored a woman’s legal personhood. She could inherit property, make a will, manage money, and act legally in her own right. She could also choose whether or not to remarry.
Her choice to remarry mattered because marriage could offer security, but it also meant surrendering legal independence once again. The law did not prevent women from remarrying, but it dictated the terms under which they did so.
Marriage also sat inside a wider system of Crown authority. People were subjects of the Crown, and marriage helped organise how the state dealt with households. Authority, property, and responsibility flowed through a single recognised legal actor, usually the husband. When a woman married, her legal identity did not vanish, but it was folded into his.
While this made governance simpler for the govenors... it narrowed women’s autonomy.
As I followed the legal trail further, one law kept coming up. At first it sounded odd: the prohibition on marrying a deceased wife’s sister.
For much of the 1800s, English law treated these marriages as invalid. This wasn’t about blood relationship. It was about affinity. Marriage created a legal kinship between a man and his wife’s family, and the law treated that connection as binding even after death.
In real life, this mattered deeply. When a woman died, her sister was often already in the household, helping care for children and keep things running. Close relationships formed. Yet the law barred marriage, leaving women in legally uncertain and sometimes precarious positions inside families they were already sustaining.
New Zealand broke from this restriction in 1880 with the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act. The Act is striking for its practicality. It does not moralise. It simply acknowledges reality and makes such marriages lawful, confirming the legitimacy of children.
The full Act can be read here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Deceased_Wife%27s_Sister_Marriage_Act_1880.pdf
Interesting after a hunt through papers past, I found evidence that Timaru was part of the debate.
In 1874, the Timaru Herald reported on the repeated failure of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Bill, expressing frustration that the Legislative Council continued to block it despite popular support. Readers in South Canterbury were being asked to think about this law in real time, not as an abstract imperial question.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THD18740826.2.32
Debate continued in 1880, with newspapers arguing that the supposed “relationship” was a legal fiction rather than a blood reality, and that the law itself was creating harm where none naturally existed.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTIM18800723.2.24
For women, this law determined whether they could remain protected within a household or remain socially and legally exposed.
The deeper I went, the clearer it became that marriage law was really about property and control.
In 1880, New Zealand passed the Married Women’s Property Protection Act, allowing women to seek court protection for property in situations many would recognise instantly: desertion, cruelty, adultery, habitual drunkenness, or a husband’s failure to provide.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZMAIL18800619.2.17
Later reforms expanded these rights further, recognising married women as capable of holding property and entering contracts in their own right. These changes were hard won and grounded in lived experience.
Te Ara provides a clear example of how women used these laws in practice:
https://teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/37016/protecting-married-womens-property
So when a man remarried, he wasn’t simply choosing companionship. He was drawing a woman into a legal system that reshaped her rights, risks, and independence.
To be able to understand marriage law better, I had to learn more about divorce.
New Zealand’s Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1867 brought divorce into local courts, but social anxiety around divorce lingered for decades. In Timaru, churches were still organising petitions in 1921 opposing changes to divorce law, reinforcing how tightly morality, law, and reputation were bound together.
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THD19211118.2.8
Marriage law was enforced not only by statute, but by community scrutiny.
Returning to Larnach
By the time I returned to William Larnach, his multiple marriages no longer felt like a personal curiosity. They were part of a legal system that allowed men to move through marriage as continuous legal selves. The women he married stepped into a framework that altered their legal identity, property rights, and security. Each marriage reset the balance again. Larnach led me to a bigger question: how law shaped women’s lives quietly, persistently, and often invisibly.
A reliable biography reference is here:
https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2l2/larnach-william-james-mudie
What the rules are today, and why the history still matters
Today, New Zealand’s Marriage Act 1955 sets out prohibited relationships clearly. A deceased wife’s sister is not among them.
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1955/0092/latest/DLM292639.html
The legal barrier is gone. But the history matters because it explains patterns we see repeatedly in nineteenth century records: swift remarriages, careful wording in wills, women disappearing from archives once married, and the constant negotiation between protection and vulnerability.
This history hunt began with one man’s ability to remarry is dead wifes sister. It ended with a clearer view of how law moved through women’s lives, sometimes as shelter, often as constraint.
Once you start following the law, you start seeing the women impacted by it.
A wider view
Following this trail has changed how I read women’s history more broadly. What first looked like a narrow question about marriage turned out to be a map of power, visibility, and control.
Women’s rights did not emerge because society suddenly decided women were equal. They emerged because the system kept failing women, while relying on them to hold families together anyway. Widowhood exposed the contradiction at the heart of marriage law. Women were trusted to manage property, raise children, and make legal decisions only when their husbands were gone. Once remarried, that trust was withdrawn.
This helps explain why women’s history so often feels fragmented. It’s not that women were absent, but that the law made them legally invisible at key moments of their lives.
Now that I see this, I know I’ll be going back to the archives with different eyes.