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How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them.

What is the meaning of “deceived of her prey”? Is it the same as “deceived by her prey”?

I can’t find the usage of “deceived of” in dictionary.

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    The writer means deprived of prey by means of deception.
    – Bruce Murray
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 11:53
  • @Bruce Murray Does “deceived of something” mean “deprived of something by deception” in general or just a rare usage here that somehow reader could understand due to context?
    – CYC
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 13:05
  • I'm giving you my best guess. I have not previously encountered that verb preposition combination; maybe I should get out more.
    – Bruce Murray
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 13:11
  • @Bruce: That wouldn't help unless you're going out with your Time Machine!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jun 26, 2020 at 13:52

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The cited usage is given in the full Oxford English Dictionary1 under definition 4...

4 a. To cheat, overreach; defraud. Obsolete.
4 b. with of: To cheat out of. Obsolete.

As @Bruce comments under the question, the writer means deprived of prey by means of deception. I think the writer here might be Virginia Woolf, so the text could be well over a century old. But it would have been a "poetic / literary / creative" usage even when written. Certainly modern-day learners shouldn't copy it.

1 Subscription-only, I'm afraid!

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