This book seems to me to be an exercise in navel-gazing.In the book there is a sadistic wife-beater and part of the plot consists of bringing him to boot. In this period I don't think this would have happened, what happened between man and wife was a private matter, and the wife was virtually her husband's property. This is the period when soldiers and school children were flogged and slavery continued in the U.S.
In any case, by the end of the book I didn't really care what happened to any of them .The author sort of apologises in the end for messing with the actual law for the sake of the plot, but the England she writes of does not feel right for the period, and she's no Dickens.