In Chancery

For a late Victorian Briton, to be "in chancery" could mean literally to be involved in a law suit (such as, for example, a divorce suit) being heard in a Court of Chancery, or, more broadly, to be trapped in any awkward predicament almost impossible to untangle (as law suits heard in the Court of Chancery often tended to be).

In this, the second volume of The Forsyte Saga, wealthy lawyer Soames Forsyte struggles to free himself from a situation he finds almost impossibly awkward, given the divorce laws of his time. Though it is now a dozen or so years since he and his wife Irene split up, they have never divorced. Soames is now desperate to have a son. What can he do? He knows that Irene is now keeping company with his cousin Jolyon. Can he persuade her to come back to him? Or should he, instead, take the risky course of attempting to prove to the world that the woman he still aches after is an adulteress, publicly shame her and divorce her, and marry a pretty French woman half his age in hopes that she will bear him the son he craves?
(Summary by Peter Dann)