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.

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.

“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.”

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.

[…]Wally had attained duchesshood at 11:47 a.m.

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

“Well, dear Eugenia might have had something to do with that. She was always a staid young woman, but achieving the exalted heights of duchesshood seems to have cast her even further into stiff propriety.[…]”

Ralph Berry, who admits that this is a “difficult pronouncement” since we must ask ourselves in what Duchesshood may “consist, when the recognizable aspects have been removed,” nevertheless concludes that she “can die like a Duchess: she can define herself as an identity by behaving at the last as a Duchess should”