Before the Reformation, the affinity rules of Catholic canon law applied, which since the Council of Elvira had regarded a deceased wife's sister as within the prohibited degrees, which could be exempted only by matrimonial dispensation from the pope.

4. c. 54),[12] which hardened the English and Irish law into an absolute prohibition, so that from then on such marriages could no longer take place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and colonies at all.

For example, the painters William Holman Hunt and John Collier married the sisters of their deceased wives in, respectively, Switzerland and Norway.

[17] Peter Ferriday observed in his biography of Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron Grimthorpe: "Was there a single eminent Victorian who did not at some time or other announce his views on the 'deceased wife's sister'?

[21] Craik had accompanied Edith Waugh to her Swiss wedding with her sister Fanny's widower William Holman Hunt.

The lengthy nature of the campaign was referred to in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe (1882), in which the Queen of the Fairies sings "He shall prick that annual blister, marriage with deceased wife's sister".

[23] In 1855, a year after resigning as Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe married his deceased Swiss wife's sister in Neuchâtel.

7. c. 47) removed the prohibition while providing savers for various existing laws, some to placate opposition of the Lords Spiritual (Church of England bishops).

The government belatedly decided to support the Bill, which David G. Barrie sees as evidence of its commitment to social reform and willingness to take on the Lords, foreshadowing the Parliament Act 1911.

[29] Section 1 of the act removed the affinity between a man and his deceased wife's sister as grounds for annulment of a past or future marriage.

Past marriages of such affinity would remain null, notwithstanding the change in law, if they had already been annulled or either spouse had subsequently married someone else.

Section 4 retained the liability to ecclesiastical censure of a Church of England clergyman who married his deceased wife's sister.

[39] Section 4 of the 1907 Act was rendered moot in 1944, when the Convocations of Canterbury and York voted to align the Church of England prohibited degrees with the civil law.

[5] The prohibition on marriage with a divorced wife's sister is the crux of the plot of Cyril Hare's 1949 novel When the Wind Blows.

In 1947 the House of Lords personal bill committee rejected a petition from a couple for a private act of Parliament exempting them from this prohibition.

[50][49] Other degrees of affinity remain prohibited in law,[51] although jurist Maebh Harding suggests a case similar to 2006 would find them unconstitutional.