"Widowhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lovers were unlucky, for she might not wed again so soon after her widowhood, and he was under orders for the war, and had no permission for such dalliance from his master, the King of Castille. So he sailed away towards Harfleur, after many protestations of affection on each side, during an eclipse of the sun which came on as he left Rouen harbour, and much ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... red velvet bag. With the velvet gown enveloping the whole, it was conveyed to Lady Ralegh's house in a mourning coach which she had sent. It was embalmed; and she kept it ever by her for the twenty-nine years of her widowhood. Bishop Goodman of Gloucester, who, though King James's poor-spirited apologist, admired Ralegh, relates that he had seen and kissed it. On Lady Ralegh's death the charge of it descended to Carew Ralegh. It has been stated, and has been denied, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... fault-finding than Leah. By sorrow and trial, Leah may have learned submission; and the dearest earthly hopes disappointed—all her affections as a wife crushed and despised—in her hour of grief, and in the desolation of a widowhood of hate, she may have sought and found that love which never faileth, which ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... came in again. Primrose had wondered at his long absence. There had been many things to disturb the serenity of the peaceful farmhouse. A sister of Aunt Lois' who had cared for the mother during years of widowhood was taken down, and died after a short illness. The mother, old and feeble, and wandering in her mind, needed constant care. There were three children also, a lad of sixteen and two younger girls, one of whom ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that Mrs. Thane married soon after her husband's death. Her second husband was a young French nobleman, many years her junior. He was killed in the war, I think at Verdun. I understand she is now living in this city. Her present name escapes me, but I know that her widowhood has been made endurable by a legacy which happens to be one in name only. In other words, he left her ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Kilfoyle one autumn evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more—all her blackest days of childless widowhood—so that this was his first visit since the ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... any very unbearable misery at her recent widowhood, this healthy young woman worked in field and house, cared for her little ones, milked the two cows out in the corral, sewed, sang, rode, baked, and was happy for very wholesomeness. Sometimes she reproached herself that she was not more miserable, remembering that long grave back in the ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... wanes, and we must see and sketch this cloudless summit from terra firma. A mile and half-way down the lake, we landed at the foot of a grassy hill-side, where once had been a lumberman's station and hay-farm. It was abandoned now, and lonely in that deeper sense in which widowhood is lonelier than celibacy, a home deserted lonelier than a desert. Tumble-down was the never-painted house; ditto its three barns. But, besides a camp, there were two things to be had here,—one certain, one possible, probable even. The view, that was an inevitable certainty; Iglesias ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... the first days of Alice's widowhood. By and by things subsided into their natural and tranquil course. But, as if the young creature was always to be in some heavy trouble, her ewe-lamb began to be ailing, pining, and sickly. The child's mysterious illness turned out to be ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... those days, his daughter suggests, and the year of conventional widowhood having expired, Mr. Sedgwick, then at the age of twenty-three, married Miss Pamela Dwight, the mother of his four sons, all successful lawyers, and his three daughters, all exemplary women. The second Mrs. Sedgwick was presumably more beautiful than the first; certainly she was more celebrated. ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... unlikeness between them, an appeal from the childish to the childlike. The childish is but the shadow of the childlike, and shadows are little like the things from which they fall. But to what save the heavenly shall the earthly appeal in its sore need, its widowhood, its orphanage? with what shall the childish take refuge but the childlike? to what shall ignorance cry but wisdom? Mercy felt no restraint with the chief as with Ian. His great, deep, yet refined and musical laugh, set her at ease. Ian's ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the mother of the little King, fulfilled her duty of seeing the funeral rites belonging to her husband properly accomplished, than she hastened to Windsor to embrace her child, and pass in solitude the early months of her widowhood. She was only in her twenty-first year, and had many arduous duties before her. The first of these was to see her baby King properly received and acknowledged as their sovereign by the nation. The sanction ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... created a chasm in our little society, which Mrs. Cole, on the foot of her usual caution, was in no haste to fill up; but then it redoubled her attention to procure me, in the advantages of a traffic for a counterfeit maidenhead, some consolation for the sort of widowhood I had been left in; and this was a scheme she had never lost prospect of, and only waited for a proper person to bring it ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... way of comforting my widowhood," said Bim. "He has made a wonderful beauty mask and often he claps it on me and whistles up a band of sighing lovers. As a work of the imagination I ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... place could be very miserable. Poor lady! her life had been one long martyrdom, all the more hard to bear because it was made up for the most part of small annoyances, petty mortifications, little recurring incessant bitternesses. And now, during the seven years of her widowhood, she had gained a calmer and serener atmosphere, in which she was raised above the possibility of humiliation from the dwarfed natures and malicious hearts in the midst of which she lived. They could hurt her feelings, they ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... in widowhood and childlessness; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment, when each soul must stand alone before its God, one Friend remains, and that ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... mean that I am never to let myself be known as I am?" asked Daphne. Her face had changed; it wore a look of fright and resistance. "Why, that would mean that I am never to unmask; to go about all my life in my trappings of false widowhood. You read what that paper called me! I cannot play the ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... with a luxurious expression, like that of Sibyls who had been feasting with Cleopatra. There was something to me strange as well as lovely in their aspect—as strange as their condition, which seems a state half-way between marriage and widowhood. They see no man except their husband; and a visit from him (except in the case of the favorite) is a rare and marvelous occurrence, like an eclipse of the sun. Their bearing toward each other was that of sisters: ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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), ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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 appaling ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... torn from the idolized young husband of her youth and thrown into a convent, where the only news that she heard of him was, that he had been killed in a duel with her ruthless father. She had mourned for him in secret, without hope and without sympathy, and before the first year of her widowhood had passed—a widowhood she had been sternly forbidden by her father either to bewail or even to acknowledge—she had been driven by a series of unprecedented persecutions to give her hand where she could not give her broken heart, and to go to the altar with a deadly secret ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... lost to me forever, as did also my daughter, my poor daughter, who, broken-hearted at the tragedy of the 'Cynthia,' still mourns every day for her only child—the joy and consolation at first of her widowhood, but afterward the ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... I our paths parted so widely in later years. Her daughter married the Earl of Sussex and her home in late years has been abroad. [July 19, 1909, Mrs. Carnegie and I found my elder-sister friend April last, now in widowhood, in Paris, her sister and also her daughter all well and happy. A great pleasure, indeed. There are no substitutes for ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... the struggle with ill health. Soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady. "What did Frances die of?" Bernard Shaw wrote to me. "Was it of widowhood?" ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... married, young, a girl half Cornish and half Irish; presently, having cost old Heythorp in all a pretty penny, he had died impecunious, leaving his fair Rosamund at thirty with a girl of eight and a boy of five. She had not spent six months of widowhood before coming over from Dublin to claim the old man's guardianship. A remarkably pretty woman, like a full-blown rose, with greenish hazel eyes, she had turned up one morning at the offices of "The Island Navigation Company," ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wondered too; and it seems perhaps like the last taint of earth, that I would, as it were, condemn you to a sort of widowhood of love when I am gone. But you must follow your own heart, and its pure and sweet advice, and the Will of Love; and you must use your treasure, not hoard it for me in solitude. Dearest, I trust you and worship you utterly and entirely. It is through ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the neat little lady whose brown hair was honestly tinged with white, and whose unlined face was innocent of make-up. Mrs. Harley had not yet recovered from her astonishment at having been swept to the altar after fifteen years of widowhood by this most simple and admirable man. Even then she was not quite sure that she was not dreaming all this. She patted his big hand and would have put her head against his chest if the brim of her hat had permitted her to ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... now Lord Rivers, has relieved you of all embarrassment; no doubt, my Lord Dorset and his kinsmen will be chevaliers enough to do the same. The Duchess of Bedford will but suit the decorous usage to retire a while into privacy, to mourn her widowhood. And when a year is told, if these noble persons reappear at court, your word and the earl's will at least have ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he prepared to wait. His hand sought the pocket of his coat, and fingered tenderly a small stone bottle, the fond companion of his widowhood. He pulled it out, uncorked it, and took a long pull; then placed it on the table ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... can dispute your power, Or as a parent, or a conqueror; But, when my year of widowhood expires, Shall yield to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... 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
... and the Book. This monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... they never brought to her any announcement of the long-awaited miracle, but they gave her the assurance that some other woman had her eye on him, and this, for some strange reason that may have been explained by Arthur's dependence on her through her long widowhood, comforted her. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... chapter—all of the people in this story in their love affairs. Hand in hand, they have come to the footlights, hand in hand they have walked before us. We have seen that love is a passion with many sides. It varies with each soul. In youth, in maturity, in courtship, in marriage, in widowhood, in innocence, and in the wisdom of serpents, love reflects the soul it shines on. For love is youth in the heart—youth that always beckons, that always shapes our visions. Love ever sheens and shimmers brightly from within us; but what it shows to the world—that is vastly different ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... ancient days of suttee when the wife mounted her husband's funeral pyre volumes have been written on the lot of the Indian widow. To-day in some cases the power of Christianity has awakened the spirit of social reform and the rigors of widowhood are lessened. Among the majority the old remains. In general, the higher you rise in the social scale, the sterner the conventions and fashions of ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... best life, all our interest in her, and all our information about her, dates, sad to say, not from her espousal, nor from her marriage day, nor from any part of her married life, but from her husband's death. Her maidenhood has no interest for us; all our interest is fixed on her widowhood. This work of fiction now in our hands begins where all other works of fiction end; for in the life of religion, you must know, our best is always before us. Well, scarcely was her husband dead when Christiana began to accuse herself of having killed ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... — N. divorce, divorcement; separation; judicial separation, separate maintenance; separatio a mensa et thoro [Lat.], separatio a vinculo matrimonii [Lat.]. trial separation, breakup; annulment. widowhood, viduity^, weeds. widow, widower; relict; dowager; divorcee; cuckold; grass widow, grass widower; merry widow. V. live separate; separate, divorce, disespouse^, put ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... herself prone on the rough pine box; or the wild, wordless wail of sudden widowhood was torn from the inmost heart of some stricken creature who had ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... of Sweden, thought to be amongst the most shining women of the world, was also known for one of the most imperious, revengeful, and relentless, and had got for herself the name of Sigrid the Proud. In her high widowhood she had naturally many wooers; but treated them in a manner unexampled. Two of her suitors, a simultaneous Two, were, King Harald Graenske (a cousin of King Tryggveson's, and kind of king in some district, by sufferance of the late Hakon's),—this luckless Graenske and the then Russian Sovereign ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... through all this labor for nothing, and that unless by some fortunate chance I could light upon some clue to his whereabouts in the great world beyond our little town, I would be likely to pass the remainder of my days in widowhood ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... Eve. Thus a new-laid egg is broken into a glass of water, and the shapes which it assumes foreshadow the fate of the person concerned. Again, seven saucers are placed in a row, filled respectively with water, earth, ashes, keys, a thimble, money, and grass, which things signify travel, death, widowhood, housekeeping, spinsterhood, riches, and farming. A blindfolded person touches one or other of the saucers with a wand and so discovers his or her fate. Again, three broad beans are taken; one is left in its skin, one is half peeled, and the third is peeled outright. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... before he landed in America his father had departed on a longer journey. The ne'er-do-well had the good grace to send back the little sums of money saved by his mother in her widowhood, and gradually his letters ceased. It was known that he was in Chili, and there was war going on there, and yet the good old lady's ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 never ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... advantages of what she calls "un bon parti." [A good match.] To this end she frequents the houses of widows and heiresses, vaunts the docility of his temper, and the greatness of his expectations, enlarges on the solitude of widowhood, or the dependence and insignificance of a spinster; and these prefatory encomiums usually end in the concerted introduction of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... And lost all shape, because it filled all space, And reached beyond the bounds of consciousness— In sudden incarnations darting swift From out its infinite a gulfy stare Of terror blank, of hideous emptiness, Of widowhood ere ever wedding-day. ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... to go through life with her, hand in hand; it changed as she grew old; it altered itself to suit her changing thought; until the very memory of her memory seemed to make it sure that he had really been alive with her, really shared her happiness or sorrow, in the far-off days of her earliest widowhood. It hardly seemed that he had been gone already then—she remembered him so well. She could not think that he had never been with her in their little cottage. And now, at sixty, I know she thought of him as ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... 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 will sole guardian of the young lord, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... who hardly concerned herself at all about her son, allowing him to grow up badly enough and committing all her maternal duties to the grandmother, was perpetually cheerful, notwithstanding that her life had been chequered by chance and her widowhood of sufficiently dramatic character, as was said. She endeavored to play the part of an adviser, an intimate friend to Adrienne. She frequently said to Madame Gerson, who rarely left her, that Madame Vaudrey would be altogether charming ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... had been in her husband's confidence, and had been his helpmeet throughout their married life. She was well able to carry on single-handed the course of action he had pursued through his long rule at Gablehurst; yet not the less for this did she feel the desolation of her approaching widowhood; and it seemed an additional sorrow (although she recognized its necessity) that Tom was also ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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
... 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, Independants, Anabaptists, and all those canting whiggish ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... days in her widowhood, when Biddy asked her to drive into the town, where Biddy had to do a little shopping—that ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... 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
... sure," she whispered, "that Lucille is anxious to be won back? She loves intrigue, excitement, the sense of being concerned in important doings. Besides—you must have heard what they say about her—and Brott. Look at her now. She wears her grass widowhood lightly enough." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... generations to the children of the nation. Then Judith went to the House of the Lord and fell upon her face and called upon the Lord who breakest the battles to bless her purpose. She went thereafter to her house, put off the garments of widowhood and of sackcloth, and bathed, and anointed herself with precious ointment, and put on the garments of gladness, with bracelets and chains and rings and ornaments to lure the eyes of all the men that should see her. Then she ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... lead them to revenge, When my great father fell, they had replied! Alas! our foe alone stood forward then. And thou, my mother, hadst thou made a sign— Hadst thou, from thy forlorn and captive state Of widowhood in these polluted halls, Thy prison-house, raised one imploring cry— Who knows but that avengers thou hadst found? But mute thou sat'st, and each Messenian heart In thy despondency desponded too. Enough of this!—Though not a finger ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... 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 dwell in France as a dowager queen, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... shocked or repelled her. Yet she was enough affected by the death of the man who had done her every despite, but who had, nevertheless, taught her the mystery of life and given her her children, to be distressed at this proposal in the first hours of her widowhood. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Mrs Garlick's. A miser, she was not the ordinary miser, being exceptional in the fact that her temperament was joyous. She had reached the thirtieth year of her widowhood and the sixtieth of her age, with cheerfulness unimpaired. The people of Bursley, when they met her sometimes of a morning coming down into the town from her singular house up at Toft End, would be conscious of pleasure in her brisk gait, her slightly malicious but broad-minded smile, and her ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... like a sister, ready with head, heart, and hand to help them help themselves; not offering pity as an alms, but justice as a right. Hardship and sorrow, long effort and late-won reward had been hers they knew; wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood brought her very near to them; and behind her was the background of an earnest life, against which this figure with health on the cheeks, hope in the eyes, courage on the lips, and the ardor of a wide benevolence warming the whole countenance stood out full of unconscious dignity and beauty; ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... themselves, women, on the other hand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed, whithersoever he has gone" [Footnote: "drippings with a Chisel," in Vol. II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief, concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, "The Wives of the Dead," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... widowhood, once said to a friend, "Whenever I find myself thinking too much about Charles, I simply force myself to read the most exciting novel I can. He is there, he is waiting for me; and hearts were made to ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... day was Sunday; and it was beautiful to see how Mrs Greenow went to church in all the glory of widowhood. There had been a great unpacking after that banquet on the sweetbread, and all her funereal millinery had been displayed before Kate's wondering eyes. The charm of the woman was in this,—that she was not in the least ashamed ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... destroy her tender young, and she 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 hands at ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... were joined by Milly, who was supposed to have left the village to proceed to a watering-place in the North for the benefit of her health, at the expense of the ladies of the Manor, who had been much interested in her state of lonely and defenceless widowhood. ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... The stay and comfort of my widowhood, A dear good boy!—when first he went to sea I felt what it would come to,—something told me I should be childless soon. But tell me Sir If it be true that for a hurt like his There is no cure? please God to spare his life Tho' he be blind, yet ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... one can say that I did not stand by William through the entire widowhood of my marriage. I was the world compass of his life, always sitting in his amen corner with my attention fixed anxiously upon the spiritual pulse of the congregation, always giving him the most nourishing food our limited means afforded, always standing ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... that in no stage of her existence can she be regarded as independent. She is dependent upon her father in childhood, the slave of her husband so long as he lives, and subject to her son during the days of her widowhood. Hinduism leaves her no opportunity, in this human existence, ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... console her anyway,—that the law didn't forget her in her widowhood. No: the law is quite thoughtful of wimmen, by spells. It says, the law duz, that it protects wimmen. And I s'pose in some mysterious way, too deep for wimmen to understand, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... all Edinburgh would be when she should look on triumphantly to see her husband die. He had played the widower in sight of all Edinburgh, and now it would be seen how great was the lie, and nobody could dispute that the widowhood was hers. She hoped that he would turn his prim figure and formal face her way, that she might make him, too, an easy bow, showing how she despised the hypocrite, and how completely he had failed in breaking her spirit. She hoped she ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... of 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; for a mourner ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... possible that Michael Angelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as early as 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year 1542, when Michael Angelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself, an ardent Neo-Catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news had reached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful and princely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received in the battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In a dialogue written by the painter, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... mother, and learned that she had been greatly tempted by Temple women in the town, who had admired the baby and wanted to get it. "If I give her to them, she will never be a widow," was the allurement there. The bitterness of widowhood had entered into her soul, and poisoned the very mother-love within her; and yet there was something of it left, for she did not want her babe to be a widow. The boy, with the leisureliness of the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... assistance of one of her sons so successfully that she was able to continue the education of her children, all of whom except the farmer obtained respectable rank in one of the liberal professions. This excellent mother lived in widowhood nearly fifty years, saw Thomas Jefferson President of the United States, and died 1803, aged ninety-three years, in the old house at home. Until she was past eighty she made with her own hands the pies for Thanksgiving-day, when ...
— Revolutionary Heroes, And Other Historical Papers • James Parton
... and Augustina spent days and days alone, while Mr. Helbeck pursued the affairs of the Church. One precious attempt indeed had been made to break the dulness of Bannisdale. Miss Fountain's cheeks burned when she thought of it. There had been an afternoon party! though Augustina's widowhood was barely a year old! Mrs. Fountain had been sent about the country delivering notes and cards. And the result:—oh, such a party!—such an interminable afternoon! Where had the people come from?—who were they? ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... called 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
... madness, a method simple and direct. He had stalked first of all into a great silk-mercer's and demanded a silk suitable for an old lady, a satin suitable for a young lady, another satin for a lady—not so young. Then, suddenly remembering that his mother used to yearn even in widowhood for plum color, while Minnie (who was pretty and had red hair) fancied a moss-green, and Kate (who was not pretty) a rose-pink, he neither paused nor rested till he had obtained these tints. Lace, too—his mother had had a perfect passion for lace, unsatisfied because of its ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... We felt disposed to stop our ears, but still we heard it, marching, marching; tramp, tramp, tramp. But hush,—uncover every head! Here they pass, the remnant of ten men of a full regiment. Silence! Widowhood and orphanage look on and wring their hands. But wheel into line, all ye people! North, South, East, West—all decades, all centuries, all millenniums! Forward, the ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... obscene and vicious rites ever practiced by savages or barbarians. There is nothing in the Vedas to justify the cruelties of the Hindu gods and the practices of the priests. They do not authorize animal worship, caste, child-marriage, the burning of widows or perpetual widowhood, but the Brahmins have built up a stupendous system of superstition, of which they alone pretend to know the mystic meaning, and their supremacy is established. Thus the nature worship of the Vedas has disappeared and has given place to terrorism, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... invidiously, cruelly foreign," Vanderbank agreed: "I've never indeed seen a woman avail herself so cleverly, to make up for the obloquy of that state, of the benefits and immunities it brings with it. She has bloomed in the hot-house of her widowhood—she's a Neapolitan hatched by ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... of your pitiful conduct, your obsequious suppliant, an eleemosynary lady of decrepit widowhood, throws herself at your Excellency's mercy feet with two imbecile childrens of various denominations. For our Heavenly Father's sake, if not inconvenient,— which we have been beneficently bereaved of other paternal description,—we humbly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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
... disposition and tastes. Lady Grenside was tall and fair, almost florid in complexion, remarkably well-preserved, with a splendid presence and figure. She had been one of the beauties of her day, and even now, in the sixth year of her widowhood, was accounted a remarkably handsome woman. Mr. Foley, her brother, was also tall, but gaunt and thin, with a pronounced stoop. His grey imperial gave him an almost foreign appearance. He had the forehead of a philosopher but the mouth of a humourist. His eyes, shrewd and penetrating—he wore no ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wisdom of the serpent. But in such use as she did make of these only weapons which Providence had given to her, I do not think that she can be regarded as very culpable. During those long years of her young widowhood in which nothing had been wanting to her, her conduct had been free from any hint of reproach. She had been content to find all her joy in her duties and in her love as a mother. Now a great necessity ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... youth—she with her weak eyes bandaged, but reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to remain with her, but forcing himself away—and then in long years after, when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... very coldly, "I 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. There ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... 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
... always in good Humour when an East-Wind blows, because it seldom fails of bringing me a Letter from him. Let me entreat you, Sir, to give me your Advice upon this Occasion, and to let me know how I may relieve my self in this my Widowhood. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... she was superb! I looked again into her healthy face and speaking eyes, with their bitter knowledge of good and evil, their scorn of scorn, their redeeming honesty and candour. The contrast was complete in every detail except the widowhood of both women; but I did not pursue it any farther; for once more there was but one woman in my thoughts, and she sat near me under a red parasol—clashing so humanly ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... that ladies, especially young ladies, must always wear their jewellery, even when travelling. Arms, wrists, neck and ankles, bare of jewels, are a sign of widowhood or dire poverty. Out young heroine was accordingly adorned with jewels and she was also richly attired. Was she not the daughter of a wealthy man and going to visit her mother-in-law? So her mother had lovingly ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... constable of Naples, and married to the Marquis of Pescara. Early left a widow, she abandoned herself to sorrow. That fidelity which made her refuse the hand of princes in her youth, rendered her incapable of a second attachment in her widowhood. The solace of her life was to mourn the loss and cherish the memory of Pescara. After passing several years in retirement, Vittoria took up her residence at Rome, and became the intimate friend of the distinguished men of her time. Her verses, though deficient ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... During her widowhood she had lived much with her mother, and had devoted herself particularly to this only brother, a delicate lad—lovable, self-indulgent and provoking—for whom the unquestioning devotion of two women had not been the best of schools. An attack of rheumatic fever ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a Portion. Adapted from the Bible and the Prayer Book, for the Private Devotion of those living in Widowhood. Collected and Edited by Lady Mary ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... years, for as many months as it was years old; and the longest time of mourning for any person whatsoever was not to exceed the term of ten months; which was the time appointed for women that lost their husbands to continue in widowhood. If any married again before that time, by the laws of Numa she was to sacrifice a cow big ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... 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, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ye, all ye that walk in Willow-wood, That walk with hollow faces burning white; What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood, What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night, Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite Your lips to that their unforgotten food, Ere ye, ere ye ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... expression, when you thought of it, and derived perhaps from horse-breeding! Interest on fifteen thousand pounds (which he paid her without deducting income tax) so long as she remained his wife, and afterward during widowhood "dum casta"—old-fashioned and rather pointed words, put in to insure the conduct of Fleur's mother. His Will made it up to an annuity of a thousand under the same conditions. All right! He returned the copies to Gradman, who took ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... consent or dissent to leasing certain portions of land in the township, known as the "sixteenth sections," which are set apart for school purposes. As a patron of a school, which presupposes her widowhood, she may vote at an election of school trustees, other than in a "separate school district," which practically limits this privilege to women in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... to hear, as her lord mounted his charger, which his squires led to the door. "It was the duty of the British female of rank," she said, "to suffer all—ALL in the cause of her sovereign. SHE would not fear loneliness during the campaign: she would bear up against widowhood, desertion, and ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prince of another, are documents of very high importance. It is considered necessary not only to make very formal provision for the personal welfare and comfort of the wife during her married life, and during her widowhood in case of the death of her husband, but also to settle beforehand the questions of succession which might arise out of the marriage, and to define precisely the rights and powers both of the husband and the wife, in the two countries to which ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... but two surviving children, three of the family dying infants, leaving only my sister Grace and myself to console our mother in her widowhood. The dire accident which placed her in this, the saddest of all conditions for a woman who had been a happy wife, occurred in the year 1794, when I was in my thirteenth year, and Grace was turned of eleven. It may be well ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Gallantry of our Nation the more powerful Part of our People, I shall dedicate a considerable Share of these my Speculations to their Service, and shall lead the young through all the becoming Duties of Virginity, Marriage, and Widowhood. When it is a Woman's Day, in my Works, I shall endeavour at a Stile and Air suitable to their Understanding. When I say this, I must be understood to mean, that I shall not lower but exalt the Subjects ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Some months after her abrupt departure from Rome, she had renounced the agreeable liberty of widowhood to marry an English nobleman, Lord Humphrey Heathfield. Andrea had seen the announcement of the marriage in a society paper in the October following and had heard a world of comment on the new Lady Humphrey in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... current small gossip of each other's doings. Isabelle was thinking of this and many other things about Percy and Conny as she waited in the still drawing-room for the funeral service to begin. She had admired Conny extravagantly at first, and now though she tried to think of her in her widowhood sympathetically, she found it impossible to pity her; while of poor Percy, who it seemed "had been too much under his wife's thumb," she thought affectionately.... The hall and the two rooms on this floor where the people had gathered were exquisitely prepared. Isabelle could see ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... virgin, to Alexander, the son of Herod, and brother of Archelaus; but since it fell out so that Alexander was slain by his father, she was married to Juba, the king of Lybia; and when he was dead, and she lived in widowhood in Cappadocia with her father, Archclaus divorced his former wife Mariamne, and married her, so great was his affection for this Glphyra; who, during her marriage to him, saw the following dream: She ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... gables, east windows and all." She told him the pecuniary results, and then hesitated. At last, when they were left alone, she informed him of the unexpected meeting with Arabella, and the latter's widowhood. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... 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 Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... 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 more worthy to typify God than ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... memory. She was always at work with her needle (for her hands were not affected) for the London children, grandnieces, and nephews who called her grandmamma, for she had had the care of their Parents during 11 years of her brother Alexander's widowhood. But Aunt Margaret could play a capital game of whist—long whist. I could see that she missed it much on Sunday. It was her only relaxation. She had given up the farm to James Brodie, who had married her cousin Jane, the eldest of the two children ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence |
