Merry widows? How attitudes to bereaved women have changed

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson play a sex worker and a widow in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. Photograph: Future Publishing/Getty Images

There’s a downside to “till death us do part” – it does. For example, 60s model Jan de Souza, co-host of Tramp nightclub with her husband Johnny Gold, died recently: of loneliness, her obituary said. He’d died a year earlier, after 50 years of marriage. It recalls the perfect little poem by Henry Wotton, Upon the Death of Sir Albert Morton’s Wife:

He first deceased; she for a little tried