In Wife to Widow, award-winning historian Bettina Bradbury explores the little-studied phenomenon of the transition from wife to widowhood to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of early nineteenth-century Montreal.

Bradbury's unique history spans the lives of two generations of Montreal women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 to reveal a picture of a city and its inhabitants across a period of profound change. Bradbury draws on a wealth of primary sources, weaving together biographies of individual women against a backdrop of the collective genealogies of over 500 , to show how women – Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish, wealthy and working-class – interacted with and shaped the city's culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy.

A truly monumental study, Wife to Widow is an immensely readable, rigorous, and compelling examination of the significance of marriage and widowhood at a key moment in history.

The first study of widowhood in Canada, this is a truly impressive undertaking. It tracks the dual heritages of the English and French legal systems, the rich cultural mixture of distinctive social customs, the ways in which couples tailored spousal relations of authority and property, the class configurations that shaped widows’ realities, and the gender issues that underlay everything else. The book will reconfigure our deepest understandings of women’s history, family history, class history, and Quebec history.

Jane Errington, Dean of Arts and member of the Departments of History, Royal Military College and Queen's University:
This groundbreaking work skillfully employs a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of traditional demographic, legal, and manuscript sources to explore the lives of two generations of women as they navigated their way through the often difficult transition from wife to widow in nineteenth-century Montreal. Highly readable, Bettina Bradbury offers us a fine example of how to get at and illuminate the lives and experiences of ordinary folk. Wife to Widow is family history of the best kind.