Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word wife comes from the Proto-Germanic word wibam, meaning "woman." In Old English it appeared as wif, meaning woman or wife, a sense unconnected to marriage that still survives in words such as midwife, goodwife, and spaewife.
A woman on her wedding day is usually described as a bride, while she is typically called a wife within the marriage. In the older customs still followed by Roman Catholic ritual, the word bride means fiancee and applies only up to the exchange of matrimonial consent, after which she is a wife.
Under English common law, a wife with a living husband, called a feme couvert, could own little property in her own name through the system of coverture. The Married Women's Property Act 1882 and similar reforms allowed wives with living husbands to own property in their own names.
Among the last European countries to establish full gender equality in marriage were Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and France in the 1980s. Greece adopted a new marriage law guaranteeing gender equality in 1983, which requires women to keep their birth names for their whole life.
A widow is a former wife whose spouse is deceased. Depending on the culture, widows may face widow inheritance, levirate marriage, or social stigmatization, and in cultures that practice sati a recently widowed woman intentionally commits suicide by fire, typically upon her husband's funeral pyre.
Traditional payments include a dowry brought by the bride or her family, a bride price paid by the husband or his family to the bride's family, or a dower paid by the husband to the wife. Dowries are still expected in parts of South Asia such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.