dowerless

About forty years of age, a man of the purest morals, entirely given up to his art, he had married from inclination the dowerless daughter of a general.

The Vendetta 2007

But if you were free to – day, to – morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl — you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow.

A Christmas Carol 2007

But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl – you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow?

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Stave 2 The First of the Three Spirits | Solar Flare: Science Fiction News 2004

He is not likely to claim the hand of a dowerless maiden.

The Black Dwarf 2004

In all his encounters with his son, the count was always conscious of his own guilt toward him for having wasted the family fortune, and so he could not be angry with him for refusing to marry an heiress and choosing the dowerless Sonya.

War and Peace 2003

And so it was that in Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, in that year of 1853, after a protracted debate, many condemnations of a God who would permit such a child to be born, and a number of drunken rages culminating in beatings of the woman who had produced this particular unfortunate offspring, the child was named John Boleslaus Lachley and reared as a son in a family which had already produced four dowerless sisters.

Ripping Time Asprin, Robert 2000

My mother would be thrown out into the streets, my sisters left disgraced and dowerless.

Into the Labyrinth Hickman, Tracy 1993

Netty no longer a dowerless bride, Dick a man of wealth without dependence upon his grandfather.

The Scarlet Feather Houghton Townley

That rascal has beaten me and stolen my daughter, but he gets a dowerless lass.

Marcia Schuyler Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

My way was yet to make in the world; to saddle myself with a dowerless wench -- even a wench whose least 'Good-morning' set a man's heart hammering at his ribs -- would have been folly, Master

The Line of Love Dizain des Mariages James Branch Cabell 1918