half-mourning

• “It also became the Victorian colour for half-mourning.”

  The Guardian: Notes and queries: Some uses for 14,000 video cassettes; The man who invented mauve; How we might miss the aliens by a few billion years

• “The costumes were stunning, particularly a lavendar and black dress that Victoria wore when she was in half-mourning.”

  Archive 2009-12-01

• “Deep mourning, for example, for a widow might be two years, followed by a period of half-mourning.”

  Victorian Funerals and Mourning

• “She went nimbly round and round the beds of anemones, tulips, jonquils, polyanthuses, and other old-fashioned flowers, looking a very charming figure in her half-mourning bonnet, and with an incomplete nosegay in her left hand.”

  Wessex Tales

• “Caroline be married in half-mourning; I am sure that mother, could she know, would not wish it, and it is odd that Caroline should be so intractably persistent on this point, when she is usually so yielding.”

  A Changed Man

• “When he laid aside his black, his whiskers, too, went into a sort of half-mourning, and appeared in grey.”

  The Newcomes

• “He dresses in half-mourning always, and never wears any jewelry, but strictly shuns all society, and prefers uncivilized regions.”

  Erema

• “And silent was that half-mourning dinner in the heat.”

  To Let

• “Margaret was no more curious than she was, Helen thought, as the maid came in with hot water and towels and began to lay out her clothes, half-mourning now, a lilac satin over a white slip decorated with white ruching and silk violets.”

  The Last Gamble

• “Most of the year it was empty; sitting like a prim Victorian lady, its slate roof in the mauve of half-mourning, on ill-tended lawns midway between the station and Carne Abbey.”

  A Murder of Quality

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