The habit of widowhood

the long version

A young girl is brought up in seclusion by her elderly parents who are obsessed with isolating her from the sinfulness of life in the wicked world. When, to secure her future, they marry her off to an elderly widower, they set in motion events more terrible than the most hateful of parents could have foreseen. A woman with an enticing sexual secret marries an elderly gentleman - and then another and another. It is all too easy, it seems, to get into the habit of widowhood. A young soldier, home from World War I, is determined to live and love not just for himself, but for all his fallen comrades. But in doing so he enrages a number of husbands. A man going through a midlife crisis meets the bully who made his life hell at school. Some things never change, he discovers, including the taste for inflicting pain. And Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, marooned in the drafty gloom of Queen Victoria's Balmoral Castle, decides that adultery and gambling can be almost as troubling as how to spell words of more than one syllable.