Word: childlessness
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Simon Challoner, the turn-of-the-century hero of Heritage, hopes to inherit the sprawling country manor that his father rules and his childless uncle owns. Papa obligingly dies, but seventyish Uncle Edwin refuses to follow suit. (Death is ardently willed and obsessively discussed in Compton-Burnett novels, usually because it is the survivors' only means to get hold oi the estate.) Instead, Uncle Edwin marries a thirtyish neighbor named Rhoda. Since age has made Uncle Edwin's conjugal privileges meaningless, the marriage is a big surprise but, hereditarily speaking, no calamity. In a moment of passion (passion...
...before, gave no hint that this was in any way a romantic marriage. Last week, when the police checked to see whether Teheran's shops were displaying a portrait of the Shah, some merchants thriftily dug out a picture of the Shah with his beautiful ex-Queen, the childless Soraya, and at least one found a photograph of him with his first wife, Fawzia (sister of Egypt's King Farouk), who had borne him only a daughter...
...finding herself childless, a widow, and sole executor of a large estate, she began, in a "wary, hardbitten, and vigilant manner" to carry on the tradition of the merchant aristocracy to which she had always belonged...
...Shaw's own sexual history was an odd one. He lost his chaste treasure on his 29th birthday, to the importunities of a widow lady named Jenny Patterson, who won by her persistence an immortality in such parentheses as this. After this momentous event Shaw slept around casually and childlessly for several years, until in his middle forties he married a "green-eyed Irish millionairess" after she had nursed him through a serious illness. After the wedding, in accordance with certain prejudices of his wife's, he gave up sex forever, and the two of them dwelt together, chaste...
...Morrison, announced their willingness to run for Governor against him. Meanwhile, federal Internal Revenue agents were winding up a full-scale investigation of his financial affairs, which may roil Ole Earl's troubled waters. ¶ Bedeviled by what one of his psychiatrists called "the pressures of being the childless branch of a dynasty." Long announced plans to adopt 14-year-old David Rankin. whom he had met in the Galveston hospital. The boy. said the Governor, had beaten him at poker with a "Mexican straight" (a hand consisting of deuce...