Indiana is a story about a loveless marriage, but a torrid extramarital romance. The novel was published in 1832, at a time when the plight of women was that of total dependence and submission to the laws of marriage which favored only the husband. In essence the novel highlights the inequalities between the genders, and viewed through this prism, it became a plea for change in the French marriage laws; as the author herself writes: "I wrote Indiana with an unreasonable but profound and legitimate sense of injustice and barbarity of those laws which still govern women in marriage, in the family, and in society."