A Modern Instance

by William Dean Howells

"A Modern Instance" by William Dean Howells is a novel published in 1882. It traces the disintegration of a marriage between Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord as they move from small-town Maine to Boston. What begins as romance gradually unravels through moral weakness, jealousy, and emotional imbalance. As the marriage collapses, those around them become entangled in the wreckage. This groundbreaking work was the first major American novel to treat divorce as a realistic possibility, establishing Howells as a champion of literary realism.