"Widowhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may appear to give it to one that asketh. For no less reason unmarried persons ought to be delayed, because they are exposed to temptations, as well virgins that are come to maturity, as those that are in widowhood and have little occupation, until they either marry or be confirmed in continence. They who know the weight of baptism will rather dread its attainment than its ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of eternal widowhood!" said she. "Let me warm it with my love, that it may not lie too cold upon my darling's breast. Now, my friends, go and rest. Pray for the emperor, and for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... much at ease, was standing with his back to the fire, and staring about him. Presently his glance lit upon the blue velvet curtains which shut off the room they were in from the larger saloon that had not been used since Lady Croston's widowhood, and an idea which had been floating about in his brain suddenly took definite shape and form. He was a prompt man, and in another second he had acted ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... been quite four months dead, and the entry of the preceding day shows how extremely ill-timed was this communication from a gentleman with whom Sir Walter had never had any intimacy. This was not the only proposition of the kind that reached him during his widowhood.—J.G.L. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... she might be mistaken, as she wished them well—God knows she bore them no ill-will, etc. She entered the drawing-room at Beech Park with a countenance cast to a totally different expression from that with which she had greeted Lady Matilda Sufton's widowhood. Melancholy would there have been appropriate, here it was insulting; and accordingly, with downcast eyes, and silent pressures of the hand, she saluted every member of the family, and inquired after their healths with that air of anxious solicitude ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... wall and moat. In the centre there is a church. The houses are occupied by the Beguines, a sisterhood of nuns in Belgium which has six thousand members. They are bound by no vows, as ordinary nuns are, and may therefore return to the world at pleasure, marry, and come back in their widowhood. They act as Sisters of Charity in the city, and some of them are wealthy; but all wear the garb of the order. There are about six hundred of them in this colony. On the door of each house is the name of the patron saint ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... gay. It is easier to conceive that such gloomy phantoms were sent into the world as withered and decrepit as we behold them now, with sympathies only for pain and grief, to watch at death-beds, and weep at funerals. Even the sable garments of their widowhood appear essential to their existence; all their attributes combine to render them darksome shadows, creeping strangely amid the sunshine of human life. Yet it is no unprofitable task, to take one of these doleful ...
— Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... noted that the year after her widowhood found her less frequently in the public meetings, less willing to organise new centres of work, more determined to avoid presidencies and chairmanships. For this she gave as an excuse the frequent trips abroad, which seemed to have no special ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... bungalow. The invitation was accepted. As a result, there was a certain amount of gossip. This, however, was promptly silenced by a second invitation, also accepted, to share his name; and, in August, 1824, Mrs. Gilbert, renouncing her mourning and her widowhood, blossomed afresh as Mrs. Craigie. It is said that the ceremony was performed by Bishop Heber, Metropolitan of Calcutta, who happened to be visiting Dacca at the time. Very soon afterwards the benedict received a staff appointment as deputy-adjutant-general ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Ta-lak-i-clak-o. The last rite paid to the Seminole dead is at the end of four moons. At that time the relatives go to the To-hop-ki and cut from around it the overgrowing grass. A widow lives with disheveled hair for the first twelve moons of her widowhood. ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... towers of Kew". 'The embellishments of Kew palace and gardens, under the direction of [Sir William] Chambers, and others, was the favourite object of her [Royal Highness's] widowhood' (Bolton Corney). ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... Eugenia, at their Country-Seat, and most Part of the Winter too; for Eugenia could by no Means be prevail'd on to lie one Night in her Mother's House; 'twas with some Reluctancy that she consented to dine there sometimes. At length the whole Year of Philadelphia's Widowhood was expir'd; during which, you can't but imagine that she was solicited and address'd to by as many Lovers, or pretended Lovers, as our dear King Charles, whom God grant long to reign, was lately by the Presbyterians, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... third part"—at length she comprehended it all. Her home was to pass into other hands: henceforth she was to be counted only as an incumbrance on it. Looking from the misery of the present down the gloom of the future, she could see only widowhood and penury. And whilst the appraisers were performing their ungracious task of overhauling cupboards and drawers, and estimating the value in cash of presents received in her courtship, she, in her quiet ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.—then in the second week of her widowhood—and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side, in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible associations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety—in the old print, in Bowles' old shop window—seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband,—a whole hemisphere in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... those of display and pugnacity. Some authors, however, argue that the song of the male cannot serve to charm the female, because the females of some few species, such as of the canary, robin, lark, and bullfinch, especially when in a state of widowhood, as Bechstein remarks, pour forth fairly melodious strains. In some of these cases the habit of singing may be in part attributed to the females having been highly fed and confined (32. D. Barrington, 'Philosophical Transactions,' ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... over her disasters with constant tears and passionate, doleful lamentations, she universally inspired deep pity." She had, indeed, lost much besides her royal husband; and in a poem written by her afterwards, the waste of her youth in widowhood, the loss of her great position as Queen of France, and her powerlessness any longer to enforce her rule in Scotland by French power, are the main burden of her complaints against Providence, not pity for ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... virtues, saw that the Duc de Penthievre's way of life, whether at Paris or at his country-seat, could neither afford his young daughter-in-law the amusements suited to her time of life, nor ensure her in the future an establishment such as she was deprived of by her widowhood. She determined, therefore, to establish her at Versailles; and for her sake revived the office of superintendent, which had been discontinued at Court since the death of Mademoiselle de Clermont. It is said that ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... had this to console her that the law didn't forgit her in her widowhood. No; the law is quite thoughtful of wimmen by spells. It sez it protects wimmen. And I spoze that in some mysterious way, too deep for wimmen to understand, it ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... be hooded delicately And use the adornment noble women use I'll mock you with my flown young widowhood, Letting my hair go loose past either cheek In two bright clouds and drop beyond my bosom, Turning the waving ends under my girdle As young glad widows do, and as I did Ere ever you saw me—ay, and when you found me And met me as a king meets a queen In the undying light of a summer night With ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... have expected it.' He was going to add, 'And is he dead?' but he checked himself. Her dress unmistakably suggested widowhood; and she had said ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Comte de C——n, to whom his relatives pretend that she was never married. Upon his death-bed he acknowledged her, however, for his wife, and left her mistress of a fortune of three hundred thousand livres a year. The first four years of her widowhood she passed in lawsuits before the tribunals, where the plaintiffs could not prove that she was unmarried, nor she herself that she was married. But Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, for a small douceur, speaking in her favour, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sorrow, sweet comfort take, In thy lone heart's widowhood, Some charmed measure may yet awake Arresting affliction's flood, And thy prison'd soul unfetter'd be By the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... wrong! Has she not mocked me, my years, my widowhood, yes, and even my hair, in the pride of her—her youth, me, the Empress ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... pursuance of banns or a licence,—between single persons,—consenting,—of sound mind,—and of the age of twenty one years;—or of the age of fourteen in males and twelve in females, with consent of parents or guardians, or without it, in case of widowhood. And no marriage is voidable by the ecclesiastical law, after the death of either of the parties; nor during their lives, unless for the canonical impediments of pre-contract, if that indeed still exists; of consanguinity; and of affinity, or corporal imbecillity, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... Marie Exili home with him, and installed her in his household, where his wife soon died of some inexplicable disease which baffled the knowledge of both the doctor and the curate, the two wisest men in the parish. The Sieur Corriveau ended his widowhood by marrying Marie Exili, and soon died himself, leaving his whole fortune and one daughter, the image of her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... replied Lavendar. "She is in reality only a girl, and her widowhood has already lasted ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... back into the house she went up into the old lady's room with the intention of breaking to her the news of Katherine Fanning's widowhood and destitution, and of her own desire to invite her to come and live ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... who had married Earl Gilbert, lived at Rufford in her widowhood. This lady inherited a considerable share of her mother's ambition and lack of scruple. In a quarrel with Sir Thomas Stanhope, a Nottinghamshire knight from whom are descended three earldoms, she dispatched a servant with the following ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... that her husband, who had much literary taste, had retained, until the end of his days, a horror of naturalism. She was the widow of a member of the 'Academie des Inscriptions', and plumed herself upon her illustrious widowhood. She was sweet and modest in her black gown and her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Signor Clementi, being in a state of widowhood, has resided at Rostino, from whence the family of Paoli comes. He lives there in a very retired manner. He is of a Saturnine disposition, and his notions of religion are rather gloomy and severe. He spends his whole time in study, except what he passes at his ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... spouseless Adriatic mourns her Lord,[lm] And annual marriage now no more renewed— The Bucentaur[388] lies rotting unrestored, Neglected garment of her widowhood! St. Mark yet sees his Lion[389] where he stood[3.H.] Stand, but in mockery of his withered power, Over the proud Place where an Emperor sued,[ln][390] And monarchs gazed and envied in the hour When Venice was a Queen with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... tongue-tied and bewildered by the joy of his finally won success, moved toward the door. On the threshold of the Home Blossy turned and waved farewell to the companions of her widowhood, while Samuel bowed in a dazed fashion, his face still as red as it was blissful. Then quickly the two passed out upon the porch. No one moved to see them off. Abe looked everywhere yet nowhere at all. Not a word was spoken even when the carriage was heard rolling ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... a novel I should of course have gone to the New Forest, and lived the simple life in sandals and few clothes, subsisting mainly on nuts; but as I was a woman in real life, with an honest contempt for what some one has called the widowhood of the unsatisfied, I settled down here. For reasons of my own I wanted to be in this part of the world. To me there is ever a healing strength in wide spaces, and Bessmoor has been my best friend. And ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... Albertus finishes the Life of a Pigeon at twenty Years; however, Aldrovandus tells us of a Pigeon, which continued alive two and twenty Years, and bred all that time except the last six Months, during which space it had lost its Mate, and lived in Widowhood. There is a remarkable Particular mention'd by Aldrovandus relating to the Pigeon, which is, that the young Pigeons always bill the Hens as often as they tread them, but the elder Pigeons only bill the Hens the first time before coupling. Pliny and Athenaeus, from Aristotle, tell ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... will promise to marry me within a year of widowhood, I will undertake to get twenty thousand francs for it from Elie Magus; and unless you marry me you will never get a thousand francs ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... be the ancestress of David and of the Messiah, and she determined to venture upon an extreme measure in order to make sure of fulfilling her destiny.[82] Accordingly, when the holy spirit revealed to her that Judah was going up to Timnah,[83] she put off from her the garments of her widowhood, and sat in the gate of Abraham's tent, and there she encountered Judah.[84] All the time she lived in the house of her father-in-law, he had never seen her face, for in her virtue and chastity she had always kept it covered, and now when Judah met ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... oration over those who fell in the Peloponnesian war, thus addresses the Athenian women: "To the wives who will henceforth live in widowhood, I will speak, in one short sentence only, of womanly virtue. She is the best woman who is most truly a woman, and her reputation is the highest whose name is never in the mouths of men for good ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... women is one of distinct inferiority; a woman is always subject to the men of her family—before marriage to her father, during marriage to her husband, in widowhood to her son; these states being known as "the three obediences." Sons who do not, however, honour their mothers outrage public opinion. Polygamy is tolerated, secondary wives being sometimes provided by the first wife when she is growing old. Secondary wives are subordinate to first wives. A ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... system, their opinions, prejudices, and habits of thought must change. Nothing is more certain than that they will change slowly; but we hold to the belief that judicious legislation will hasten the process more powerfully than anything else."—The "Times" on Child-Marriage and Enforced Widowhood ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... expressions of love. There must have been some pang when she reflected that the cruel wrong which she had inflicted on him had probably hurried him to his grave. As a widow, in the first solemnity of her widowhood, she was wretched and would see no one. Then she returned to England and shut herself up in a small house at Brighton. Lady Linlithgow offered to go to her, but she begged that she might be left to herself. For a few short months the ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... families, fortunes impaired and futures mostly behind. Then there were gay fox-hunting holluschickies, without serious intent and minus both future and past worth mentioning, who called and sat on the front porch because they thought their presence would be pleasing and relieve the tedium of widowhood. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... those she was hanging out, many had belonged to her grandmother, and mother, and aunts, and great-aunts, you can fancy what a wonderful array there was. Her own wedding-dress was among them, and all the coloured silks and satins she had possessed before her widowhood. And more wonderful even than the dresses were a few, not very many, for indeed no room or wardrobe would have held very many, bonnets, or 'hats,' as I think they were then always called. Huge towering constructions, with feathers sticking ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... trying to make them believe that he possessed the unheard-of courage to tackle an armed burglar; and because he was a milliner. As for Mrs. Champney, she was the embodiment of all that the average citizen resents: a combination of wealth, refinement, intelligence, arrogance and widowhood. Especially does ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... That starched and ceremonious countenance looks not so much back as forward, and is rather intended to get a new husband than to lament the old. When I was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady, who is yet living, the widow of a prince, wore somewhat more ornament in her dress than our laws of widowhood allow, and being reproached with it, she made answer that it was because she was resolved to have no more love affairs, and would never ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... her bedroom window staring out, in that vague instinct which compels humanity in moments of doubt and perplexity to seek this change of observation or superior illumination. Not that Mrs. Wade's disturbance was of a serious character. She had passed the acute stage of widowhood by at least two years, and the slight redness of her soft eyelids as well as the droop of her pretty mouth were merely the recognized outward and visible signs of the grievously minded religious community in which she lived. The mourning she still wore was also partly in ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... other lands, how inconsiderable seem the disturbances that disfigure our home annals, how peaceful the changes in our constitutional system, brought about orderly in due form of law, how purely domestic the saddest events of our internal history! We wept with our Sovereign in her early widowhood, a bereavement to the people as well as to the Queen; we trembled with her when the shadow of death hung over her eldest son, rejoicing with her when it passed away; we shared her grief for two other of her ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... heightened the iniquity of Welbeck into the blackest and most stupendous of all crimes? These ideas were necessarily transient. Conclusions more conformable to appearances succeeded. This lady might have been lately reduced to widowhood. The recent loss of a beloved companion would sufficiently account for her dejection, and make her present ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... when numberless applications were made to succeed him [in the Club], Johnson was deaf to them all. He said, "No, there never could be found any successor worthy of such a man;" and he insisted upon it there should be a year's widowhood in the club, before they thought of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... unreasonably fond of his father, and assented to his wishes without demur, even when the great Fontevrault estates hung on his fidelity to a useless oath. Then he died, and I settled into the blank stupidity of my widowhood. I, who had known no master but my own sweet will, now found myself in a hundred ways restricted. I was ruled through Fred. He must graduate at Harvard; the great establishment, splendid but tedious, must be maintained. So ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of your father. I see that his villany has distressed a heart which Heaven has made alive to even the slightest appearance of dishonor. But be consoled, my son! I have prevented the publicity of his conduct by an ambiguous story of your mother's widowhood. Yet notwithstanding this arrangement, she has judged it proper that you should not enter general society without being made acquainted with the true events of your birth. I believe my daughter is right. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... For it was thus," he adds, "that from the moment she became a widow, I always saw her with her pale hue, as long as I had the honour of seeing her in France, and Scotland, where she had to go in eighteen months' time, to her very great regret, after her widowhood, to pacify her kingdom, greatly divided by religious troubles. Alas! she had neither the wish nor the will for it, and I have often heard her say so, with a fear of this journey like death; for she preferred a hundred times to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that, I should think, after seventeen years of widowhood. Why, Granger must be at least fifty." "My dear Mr. Lovel, I hope you are not going to call ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... impulses which were quickening her again into happy youth: I realized nothing of her having been lonely—nothing of the pain and passion of longing which must have tried her through these eight years of widowhood, without any companionship save mine, with such cruel silence when she had been used to every tenderness, to constant loving flatteries, to gentlest ministrations—or I hope I should not so bitterly have resented this new hope of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... head. And still it was his wife who held him and sustained him through all and, ere the last stroke of the executioner, had received his last breath. She took up one of the severed hands, kissed it, and placed it in her bosom, and escaping to Byzantium, there spent her life in widowhood. ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sixteenth century, he put down most of the outer fortifications. Without these the chateau is as much a part of the town of Eu as Buckingham Palace is of St. James's Park. Catherine of Cleves, the widow of the great Duke of Guise, lived at Eu through her long widowhood in the friendliest relations with the good people of the town, while the architects were erecting for herself and her murdered husband, 'the nonpareil of the world,' as she called him (notwithstanding his admiration of Mme. de Noirmoutiers), the beautiful monuments ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... magnificent pasha, that, hearing of your arrival, they have come thither in the name of themselves, and the other eleven ladies of his late highness's harem, to know when it will be your princely pleasure to bid them cast aside the sombre weeds of widowhood, and——" ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... threatens the life of a friend or any person who may happen to be mentioned as ill,—the worthy soul's better feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... time had I felt such respect for that quiet woman, Madame de Clericy, as on this afternoon when widowhood first cast ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... embrio — She attached herself to Lismahago for no other reason but that she despaired of making a more agreeable conquest. At present, if I am not much mistaken in my observation, she would gladly convert the widowhood of Baynard to her own advantage. — Since he arrived, she has behaved very coldly to the captain, and strove to fasten on the other's heart, with the hooks of overstrained civility. These must be the instinctive efforts of her constitution, rather than the effects of any ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... this outburst of grief, knowing that it must be a great relief to her overtaxed system after the strain of the last few days. She was soon again calm, and resumed her writing. A letter to her parents, informing them of her secret marriage and sudden widowhood, was next written, and Lina, in her plain bonnet and shawl and closely veiled, set off with the three letters to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... husband's name preceded by "Mrs.," except in case of well-known names, such as Mrs. Potter Palmer, or Mrs. Isabella B. Hooker. A widow is no longer called by her husband's given name, but reverts to her own christened cognomen, preceded by "Mrs." Thus, Mrs. James H. Hayes in her widowhood is, to every one, Mrs. Helen B. Hayes. An exception to this would be in the case of such well-known names as Abraham Lincoln, or James G. Blaine, where custom grants the widow the right to bear ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... church, though in her weeds of widowhood, is become the desire of the eyes of the nations; for indeed her features are such, considering who is her head, where mostly to the eye beauty lies, that whoso sees but the utmost glimpse of her, is easily ravished with her ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to her aunt, 'you cannot suffer this scandal. The meanest peasant may weep her first year of widowhood in peace.' ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ellesmere, which had been a good deal interrupted during the years I passed out of England, was renewed the year before her death, when I visited her at Hatchford, where she was residing in her widowhood, and where I promised her when I left her I would return and stay with her again, but was never fortunate enough to do so, her death occurring not ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... had abandoned her comfortable widowhood without sufficient reflection: and now she had to put up as best she might with the difficulties of Herr Rauchfuss's disposition—sighing or complaining would ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... them forth toward the litters which were to convey them so long a journey. Lady Ruthven came first, and Wallace placed her tenderly in her carriage. The countess next appeared, clad in the deep weeds of widowhood. Her child followed in the arms of its nurse. At the sight of the innocent babe, whom he had so often seen pressed to the fond bosom of the father it was now following to his grace, tears rushed into the eyes of Wallace. Lady Mar hid the tumult of her feelings on ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Byron never doubted his salvation. Ever before her, during the few remaining years of her widowhood, was the image of her husband, purified and ennobled, with the shadows of earth for ever dissipated, the stains of sin for ever removed; 'the angel in him,' as she expressed it, 'made perfect, according to its ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a second or third time, land and possessions held in her name, during her widowhood, immediately became the property of the next husband. For that reason, women, on contemplating a second marriage, and wishing the children by a former husband to have the benefit of their father's holdings, either gave them title to the possessions, ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... by which it is typified that she quitted Youth and came to Old Age. She bore sons to this man also, by whom are typified the Virtues which befit Old Age, as previously said. Hortensius died, by which is typified the end of Old Age, and Marcia, made a widow, by which widowhood is typified Extreme Old Age, returned in the early days of her widowhood to Cato, whereby is typified the Noble Soul turning to God in the beginning of Extreme Old Age. And what earthly man was ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... her children were grown up, married, and, in the language of the time, "gone away." She was in truth a lone woman, busying herself in household and farming affairs. With a few negroes, and a miserably poor piece of land, she struggled in her widowhood with fortune, and contrived, with North Carolina frugality and industry, not only to make a decent living, but to lay up something for a rainy day, as she phrases it. In her visits to her fields and garden, I ran by her side and listened to stories of Tory atrocities and Whig ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... our latest day, it cannot but be regarded as more certainly and evident near at an advanced age. Anna, after the lapse of a century, had greater reason, surely, to apprehend her dissolution, than in the bloom of youth, or at the commencement of her widowhood; and how ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... his mother, a woman of much the same bright, keen, alert sweetness of air and countenance: still under sixty, and in perfect health and spirits-as well she might be, having preserved, as well as deserved, the exclusive devotion of her only child during all the years in which her early widowhood had made them all in all to each other. Ten years ago, on his election to a lectureship at one of the London hospitals, the son had set up his name on the brass plate of the door of a comfortable house in a once fashionable ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when that stillness is to divide us eternally from others; when those we have loved with all the passion, the devotion, the watchful sanctity of the weak human heart, are to exist to us no more! when, after long years of desertion and widowhood on earth, there is to be no hope of reunion in that INVISIBLE beyond the stars; when the torch, not of life only, but of love, is to be quenched in the Dark Fountain, and the grave, that we would fain hope is the great restorer ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expressions of sympathy and regret from all parts of the empire and from many states of the union. The letters and telegrams of condolence which Lady Tilley received during the first days of her widowhood would of themselves fill a volume, showing how widely he was known and respected. The funeral, which took place on the Saturday following his death, was one of the largest ever seen in St. John, and was attended ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... immediately sets out in quest of a male, who is no laggard when he hears her call. The same is true of ducks and other aquatic fowls. The propagating instinct is strong, and surmounts all ordinary difficulties. No doubt the widowhood I had caused in the case of the woodpeckers was of short duration, and chance brought, or the widow drummed up, some forlorn male, who was not dismayed by the prospect of having a large family of half grown birds on his ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... reason in the world to believe. She was really a beautiful woman, and of a sanguine complexion, but-had always carried herself with so much reserve, and given so little encouragement to any of the other sex, that she had passed her widowhood with very few solicitations to alter her way of life. This gentleman observing my mother's conduct, in order to ingratiate himself with her, had shown numberless instances of regard for me; and, as ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... with you it is different. You have now decided to live for Dick, and let your waist measure look after itself; but I have larger aims and fewer years than you, dearest. My conception of self-respecting widowhood is to be as young as possible, as attractive as possible, as rich as possible, and eventually to read my title clear to (at least) a baronet, and have a castle in a good hunting county. There are difficulties in my upward way, yet I feel ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... deprecatory, worrying attitude had become second nature with my mother long years before her widowhood, and had lined and seamed her poor forehead and silvered her hair before my Rugby days were over. Bereavement merely gave point to ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... we comprehended from the sudden tears which filled the beautiful eyes of the countess as she spoke of the earl's decease, was a severe one. Still, the grief of widowhood must have been greatly assuaged by love for her children, and not inconsiderably, after a while, we may be sure, by the brilliant position in which she was left—as, in addition to being splendidly jointured, she was appointed by her husband's ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... marry," Molly inquired; "one can't be sure of the widowhood, and if one has courage and self-denial a life of single blessedness is attainable ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... from the aged to the absurdly immature. It was only after a period of bewilderment that it dawned upon us that the sepulchral garb and heavy crape veils reaching from head to heel were not necessarily the emblems of widowhood, but might signify some state of minor bereavement. In Britain a display of black such as is an everyday sight at Versailles is undreamt of, and one saw more crape veils in a day in Versailles than in London in a week. Little girls, though their legs might be uncovered, had their chubby features ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... the slightest chance of success. She was convinced that by returning from Elba, he was only preparing for France a new invasion, and for himself chains. Since she was a prisoner of the Coalition, she was condemned to widowhood, even in the lifetime of her husband. She cannot then be blamed for remaining at Vienna, whence ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... might do what I would; for she had not spoken about it, but was resolved to live apart from me." This was fairly giving me my discharge, and I thought of taking my measures privately to retire. As I had not, since my widowhood, made any visits but such as were of pure necessity, or charity, there were found too many discontented spirits, who made a party with her against me. The Lord required of me an inviolable secrecy of all my pains, both exterior and interior. ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... from that time she was passed as a treasure from one member of the aristocracy to another, and received high stipends, and presents of at least equal value. Being a German, she put by money, and let her husband know it. But in the seventh year of her enforced widowhood her letters began to undergo subtle changes, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... sufficient income, and before his death a formal reconciliation had taken place between the runaway daughter and her north-country parents, from whom she later inherited the money which had supported herself and her daughter throughout the years of her widowhood. ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a half-brother, Richard, much younger than himself. They are the children of the same mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by whom she had this second child. George had already left home to earn his living, with the consequence that the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the occasion upon which the story opens. Richard, ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... and aggressively healthy offspring, were always in evidence. And there was Mrs. Larrabbee. What between wealth and youth, independence and initiative, a widowhood now emerged from a mourning unexceptionable, an elegance so unobtrusive as to border on mystery, she never failed to agitate any atmosphere she entered, even that of prayer. From time to time, Hodder himself was uncomfortably ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the cities of Gleb. No pen can depict the horrors of the assault. After a few hours of dismay, shriekings and blood, the city was in ashes, and the wretched victims of man's pride and revenge were conducted to the vicinity of Kief, where they reared their huts, and in widowhood, orphanage and penury, commenced life anew. Gleb himself in this foray was taken prisoner, conducted to Kief, and detained there ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of the deceased lives there, supplied with food by his friends, until the head of the corpse becomes nearly detached by the process of putrefaction, when it is removed and handed over to the custody of the eldest wife. She carries it about with her in a bag during her widowhood, accompanying the party of the tribe to which she belongs from place to place. The body, or rather the headless skeleton, is then interred in a shallow grave over which a mound is raised ornamented by wooden posts at the corners painted red, with ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... dear man I am positive that you had no intention of coming here. My dear, I am a woman of experience, and I know the world. While he is away you have a fever in your blood. Your sad heart flies for comfort to these foreign lands. At home you cannot bear the sight of that empty bed—-it is like widowhood. Since the death of my dear husband I have ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... of Jesus must never be forgotten. His attitude to woman has altered her position in the world. No one can study society in classical antiquity or in non-Christian lands with any intimacy and not realize this. Widowhood in Hinduism, marriage among Muslims—they are proverbs for the misery of women. Even the Jew still prays: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God! King of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman." The Jewish woman has to be grateful to God, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... always good and kind to me; and after he had sailed, how I hoped for his return! The lot of a sailor's wife is not to be envied. Alone and solitary for so many months, watching the long wick of the candle, and listening to the howling of the wind—foreboding evil and accident—wreck and widowhood. He had been gone about six months, Philip, and there was still a long dreary year to wait before I could expect him back. One night, you, my child, were fast asleep; you were my only solace—my comfort in my loneliness. ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... hospitality to misfortune. He filled her lap with plenty; and, leading her towards us as before the elders of the city, declared his purpose to take her in marriage. At this scene, Madame de la Tour, recalling the desolate situation in which she had been left by her relations, her widowhood, and the kind reception she had met with from Margaret, succeeded now by the soothing hope of a happy union between their children, could not forbear weeping; and these mixed recollections of good and evil caused us all to unite with her in shedding tears ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... it had happened that I saw the light. . . . My mother died, a year later: and after seven years of widowhood my father married again. My sister Sally—the recipient of those long letters you see me inditing o' nights—is my step-sister, and an adored one ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... brother's memory. Not for Fred's sake, but Nettie's, he held his place in the troubled cottage, and assumed the position of head of the family. Hard certainties of experience prevented the doctor's unimaginative mind from respecting here the ideal anguish of sudden widowhood and bereavement. This was a conclusion noways unnatural or surprising for such a life as Fred's—and Edward knew, with that contemptuous hardness into which incessant personal contact with the world drives most men, that neither the wife nor the children ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... replied Monsieur de Rhetore, in that high-pitched tone of his, "my sister had too much imagination not to be romantic and visionary. She loved her first husband, Monsieur de Macumer, passionately, but after a time one gets tired of everything, even widowhood. This Marie-Gaston crossed her path. He is agreeable in person; my sister was rich; he was deeply in debt and behaved with corresponding eagerness and devotion. The result was that the scoundrel not only succeeded Monsieur de Macumer and killed his wife with jealousy, but he got out ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... is morbid. You have never forgiven God for taking away your husband. You have been keeping a grudge against Him all these years of your widowhood." ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... it in place; and that was close upon eight years ago. On the morrow, her pious duty fulfilled, she had taken post for Plymouth, there to embark for America; and the intervening years had been lived in widowhood at Eagles until the outbreak of the Revolution had forced her, early in 1775, to take shelter in Boston, and in the late fall of the year to sail back to England. For Eagles, though unravaged, had passed into the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the whole correspondence would occupy much space, and we can only briefly refer to a few of the letters at different periods of her long life of widowhood. To Burnet, the Bishop of Salisbury, she writes, in 1690: "When anything below is the object of our love, at one time or other it will be a matter of our sorrow. But a little time will put me again into my settled state of mourning; ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... water?"[8] Our Thanksgiving had been a cheerful one, though colored, as such anniversaries are likely to be, with recollections of the absent, or the dead; for the memory of my father was always present to my mother, then and during a long widowhood of almost half a century, and my older brothers were at sea. My mother was an excellent housekeeper, and we had plenty of the usual belongings of the festival, so eagerly looked forward to by the ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... marriage for the child Zarla, came into the Chamber of Counts of the Kingdom—not many days since—and with much grossness of speech would have discussed the matter at length in that presence; which we, of her household—she being in the first grief of her young widowhood—prevented, through members of the Queen's Council, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... boy,—that much I can see in any spring on which the sun shines,—and yet I could not get the hussy to a promise, or even a cordial willing smile, though she will laugh by the hour. If she has dared to marry in my absence, she'd be like to know the pleasures of widowhood afore ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... abstract substantives, by adding the termination ness; and a few in hood or head, noting character or qualities: as white, whiteness; hard, hardness; great, greatness; skilful, skilfulness, unskilfulness; godhead, manhood, maidenhead, widowhood, knighthood, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... Prematurely old and prematurely disappointed, she had all the inexperience of girlhood with the cares of maternity, and kept in her family circle the freshness of an old maid's misogynistic antipathies with a certain guilty and remorseful consciousness of widowhood. She supported the meagre household to which her husband had contributed only the extra mouths to feed with reproachful astonishment and weary incapacity. She had long since grown tired of trying to make both ends meet, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte |
