DOLLY LEVI: Horace, you can’t deny it, your wife would have to be a SOMEBODY. Answer me: am I a somebody?

VANDERGELDER: You are . . . you are . . . A wonderful woman.

DOLLY LEVI: Oh, you’re partial.

VANDERGELDER: Dolly, everybody knows that you could do anything you wanted to do

Women are normally the recipients, occasionally even the victims, of masculine marriage proposals. However not all the fair sex have been content to adopt the missionary position, to lie back and take whatever’s coming. Some women are obliged to make the running themselves by virtue of their situation. British queens regnant, for instance, always have to propose. The idea is that no one of a lesser rank could presume to the impertinence.

This explains why Queen Victoria had to propose to Prince Albert. The whole thing threw her into an agony of apprehension, as she wrote to her uncle:

I may not have the FEELING for him which is requisite to ensure happiness. I MAY like him as a friend, and as a COUSIN and as a BROTHER, but not more . . . I am very, VERY ANXIOUS . . .

The arrival of Prince Albert in person changed all this in the twinkling of an eye. ‘Albert’s beauty is most striking, and he so amiable and unaffected — in short, very fascinating,’ the Queen confided. `He seems perfection, and I think that I have the prospect of a very great happiness before me. I love him more than I can say.’

Head over heels, the little Queen lost no time. Within three days of his arrival, she sent for him to the Blue Closet at Windsor, and there, as she told her dear diary:

I said to him, that I thought he must be aware WHY I wished him to come here — and that it would make me TOO HAPPY if he would consent to what I wished (to marry me).

Albert broke into ecstatic German, kissed her hands, and accepted with joy. They were so happy together that, after Albert’s death, Victoria could queen it no longer without him, but settled into her endless mourning as `the Widow of Windsor’.

Most girls, though, propose to make sure of the man they love, or at least to try. In two of the world’s greatest love stories, everyone always forgets that Juliet proposes to Romeo, and Scarlett O’Hara to Ashley Wilkes. Another impetus, for females, is the desire to protect themselves from all the other creepies and crawlies, ghosties and ghoulies, and things that want to go bump in the night.

Both factors influence the heroine of America’s most famous marriage proposal in Longfellow’s terrific poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish. The whole thing is a splendid piece of poetical prestidigitation anyway, since there is no courtship — and not exactly what you’d call a proposal, either. If that sounds ridiculous, now read on . . .

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