duchesshood

Our Lady’s, rustic-latticed!—made her wife. / War snatched the secret suitor: whispers base / Beat down the lilied maid. Back from the strife / Came Duke: her Duchesshood cut sneering with a knife.

1894, Henry Hanby Hay, “Pride or Love”, in Sarah Tyson Rorer, editor, Household News: A Monthly Magazine for the Home Circle, page 693, column 1

At this time the Earl of Bristol had died, and her husband had succeeded to the title so that, as Horace Walpole put it, her Countesshood saved her Duchesshood from being burnt in the hands.

1907, The Solicitors’ Journal and Weekly Reporter, volume LI, page 755, column 1

“Your brother is a cold-hearted tyrant, and his wife is a snob. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t hang on to her duchesshood after marrying again. It would be good enough for me to call myself Lady Northmorland, and I hope I shall some day.”

1911, C. N. Williamson, The Golden Silence, page 19

Now I can turn left to the centre of roses (Queen Mary’s—she again, metamorphosed now out of Princess- and Duchesshood) or go on past the big knobbed tree that says it is a manna ash, and on past the next which is a weeping elm, to the little hill still fragrant with herbs, although most of them are withering.

1972, Doris Lessing, Stories, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, page 152

Good samaritan that he was! He had secured scorn and rejection for her instead of exalted duchesshood!

1985, Kimon S. Neophyte, Xenos, Kabelkarnimf, →ISBN, page 205