False Widow

A woman who falsely claims widowhood. Usually to avoid the stigma of having a child with no husband, or to escape a loveless marriage, or to play on people's pity for widows. Can be depicted as a Wicked Widow or a Wonderful Widow, depending on the circumstances.

"It seemed she'd told the truth despite herself."
 * Fawn at the beginning of The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold claims to be a "grass widow" to explain why she is pregnant and alone. Dag delicately inquires if she knows what a grass widow is. Fawn had thought it meant a woman recently widowed; it really meant a woman in her exact situation, never married but claiming to be widowed in order to escape the stigma of unwed pregnancy.


 * A male version in an episode of CSI: Miami had the Villains of the week being a group of con artists posing.
 * One of the earliest examples is Helen Graham from Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She's escaping a horrible marriage.
 * Maxi in the novel I'll Take Manhattan decides that it's much cooler to be a widow than a teenage divorcee, and fakes being a widow (runs around in black, sighing tragically, what have you) instead. In her defense, she was 19 and way dumb for it.
 * Mrs. Arbuthnot of Oscar Wilde's play A Woman of No Importance.
 * Inverted in Bounce: Gwyneth Paltrow's character is a widow but claims to be divorced because she was sick of people pitying her. Since, in her words, "everyone is divorced these days", they don't pity her as much when she tells that lie.
 * The topic was discussed in one of the Anne of Green Gables books. In one of those "out of the mouths of babes" situations, a schoolgirl expresses the desire to be a widow. Consider that this is the nineteenth century, where divorce is practically unknown and being unmarried is socially unacceptable. A widow gets the best of both worlds.
 * Another male example: In The Rainmaker, File falsely claims to be a widower.
 * In an episode of Carnivale, Sophie pretends to be a widow in order to get into bed with a random stranger in town.
 * Vianne in The Girl With No Shadow changes her name and pretends to be a widow to explain the existence of her two children.
 * Constance MacKenzie in Peyton Place. She moves away from her small town and has an affair with a married man, who dies shortly after impregnating her with their illegitimate daughter, Allison. Forced by the circumstances to return to said small town, Constance takes the dead lover's name and pretends to be his widow, even altering Allison's birth certificate by one year to make her appear legitimate. Allison has a Heroic BSOD after learning the truth.
 * In a bizarre twist on this trope, Victor Mancha of the Runaways comic books thinks that his dad was a marine who died in the first Gulf War. It turns out that
 * Pharinet in Chronicles of Magravandias claims widowhood even though there's no solid proof her husband is dead. It serves the practical purpose of letting her move out of her husband's house and back with her own family, which she always wanted.