Definition of "interregnum"

It was not till the kings had been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in, leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism arrived.

1897, Edward Bellamy, Equality, Chapter 15

Is it not Pelham who wonders what becomes of servants when they are not wanted;—whether, like the tones of an instrument, they exist but when called for? About servants we will not decide; but that some such interregnum certainly occurs in female existence on rising from table, no one can doubt who ever noted the sound of the dining and the silence of the drawing-room.

1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XV, in Romance and Reality. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], page 224

This was in that strange pause of the storm which is its most remarkable feature in the South—that singular interregnum of the winds, when, after giving repeated notice of their most terrific action, they seem almost to forget their purpose, and for a few moments appear to slumber in their inactivity.

1835, William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan, Harper, Chapter XIV, page 179

Between the end of the Fowler régime in 1931 and the advent of Stanier in 1932, there was a short interregnum during which Ernest Lemon was in charge, with Ernest Beames as his principal aide-de-camp.

1946 May and June, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, page 146

All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Durex.

1995, Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, London: Victor Gollancz, page 17