A reader whose insights I value very much wrote me several days ago to ask about Elizabeth Mavor’s book The Ladies of Llangollen (London: Joseph, 1971), which I mentioned in response to a comment about a posting here recently. Because at least one reader has expressed an interest in knowing more about the book, I thought I’d share a few reflections, now that I’ve finished it.
First, a disclaimer: I read this book, in part, because of an eccentric interest of mine that few readers would share. And that means that I read parts of it sketchily, since my focus was on finding references that provide information about my particular interest. That interest has to do with the family of one of the two ladies of Llangollen, the Ponsonbys.
First, a disclaimer: I read this book, in part, because of an eccentric interest of mine that few readers would share. And that means that I read parts of it sketchily, since my focus was on finding references that provide information about my particular interest. That interest has to do with the family of one of the two ladies of Llangollen, the Ponsonbys.
The two “ladies of Llangollen,” Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, were natives of Co. Kilkenny, Ireland—as was my great-grandmother Catherine Ryan. Unlike Eleanor and Sarah, however, who were members of the Anglo-Irish elite that dominated Ireland’s economic and political life of the period, Catherine was born to a landless Irish laborer, Valentine Ryan, and his wife Bridget Tobin in southern Co. Kilkenny—not far from the Ponsonby estate, Bessborough House, in Piltown.
In fact, the first traces I can find of Valentine Ryan’s parents John Ryan and Margaret Oates in the early 1800s indicate to me that John lived on the Bessborough estate and worked for the Ponsonby family. He was subsequently to move to the Ponsonby villages of Harristown and Milltown, north of Piltown, which further suggests to me a connection to the Ponsonbys—the connection of a laborer to the family of landed gentry on which he and his family depended.
And so I read anything I can find about the Ponsonbys, in the hope of finding clues that will help me understand the conditions under which these Irish ancestors of mine, who were to emigrate to America in 1852, lived. My ongoing quest for information that might assist me in this search led me to The Ladies of Llangollen.
Having said that, I should also note that this book has been on my “to-read” list for years, when I first saw it in a bookstore in Toronto in the late 1970s. The story it tells cannot fail to fascinate anyone interested in the history of gay relationships. It’s a romantic, alternately heartening and grim, story of two upper-class Anglo-Irish women of the late 18th and early 19th century who fell in love with each other and decided, against many odds, to share their lives.
Eleanor was from a branch of the aristocratic Butler family of Co. Kilkenny that had managed both to remain Catholic and to hold onto its land—a difficult feat in a country whose laws hinged ownership of property on the renunciation of the “old religion” of Catholicism. Bookish and retiring, she did not encourage potential suitors, and her family decided to remedy the problem of Eleanor by sending her to a convent in France.
Sarah was from a cadet branch of the Bessborough Ponsonbys, and she shared Eleanor’s determination not to marry. Both women were attracted to the notion of a life in retirement from society that was becoming influential in various parts of Europe in the latter half of the 18th century following Rousseau: a life of seclusion in a “natural” setting, in which one could read, study the classics and various languages, paint, dance, garden, gothicize (and in the case of Eleanor, harangue and bully one’s servants on a daily basis).
In short, Eleanor and Sarah wanted what was not easily provided for upper-class women of their period who refused to marry, enter a convent, or live the marginal lives of spinsters pitied and provided scraps by their married siblings and other family members. They wanted lives of their own. Together.
And so they made plans to elope together, and in 1778, they did just that, Sarah jumping from the parlor window of relatives, Lord and Lady Fownes, with whom she was living, her little dog Frisk in her arms. She then joined Eleanor and the two went to Waterford to catch the ferry to Wales. They were dressed as men.
Unfortunately, the ferry was running on Irish time, and did not appear as scheduled, so the eloping couple hid in a barn. Where their outraged relatives found them in a day or so, forcing both to return home.
This did not deter the couple, and at their first opportunity, Eleanor and Sarah flew the coop again, this time crossing successfully over to Wales. Where they settled by 1780 in a modest stone cottage, Plas Newydd, near Llangollen. They made this their home up to Eleanor’s death in 1829 and Sarah’s in 1832, attracting streams of visitors including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, and the positive attention of members of the British and French royal families.
Their days at Plas Newydd were spent gardening, reading and writing, drawing and painting, learning languages, improving their house and its grounds: in short, they did precisely what they had intended to do when they ran off together, living as a couple in (relative) control of their own lives, despite their families’ discontent with the choice they had made. They shared one bed. All their books were marked with Eleanor’s initials on front and Sarah’s on back. In correspondence and diaries, they refer to each other persistently as “my Beloved.” It’s important to note, of course, that their upper-class status provided them the relative freedom they needed to live in this way. Women of less privileged backgrounds who fell in love with each other at the time could most likely only dream of what Eleanor and Sarah had accomplished.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were understood to be “romantic friends,” a phrase that, at this period, did not necessarily connote erotic attachment, but which referred to the devotion of two friends who had determined to mingle their lives in the pursuit of ideals admired by the Romantic period, including solitude and a harmonious relationship to nature. Even in their lifetimes, however, there were strong hints and widely circulated rumors that the couple were more than merely “friends,” that they were, in fact, lovers.
And so they endured considerable scorn from some highly placed members of society who hinted that Eleanor was the man and Sarah the woman in a grotesque ménage that defied natural law, social convention, and Christian moral teaching. As with women in almost any period of history seeking to live independent of male control, they had unrelenting, brutal problems obtaining money to support themselves. Both of their families, for the most part, shunned and refused them financial succor.
Even so, they managed. They not only endured; they prevailed. And despite the rumors of their Sapphic involvement, they enjoyed the esteem and protection of the villagers of Llangollen and widespread support from the many writers and scholars who admired them for their devotion to their romantic ideals.
As with any such love story from the pre-Freudian period of Western history, there has been ongoing controversy about whether Eleanor and Sarah were, in fact, lovers. Even those who admired and supported them frequently spoke of them as virgins: they were admired and supported, in part, because of the understanding that they were single women who had eschewed marriage and sexual involvement in order to fulfill intellectual interests.
As with Lincoln and even Whitman, scholars who have noted the inconvenient fact that Eleanor and Sarah shared a bed have often preferred to draw a veil around said bed, noting that it was customary for people of the same sex, up to relatively recently, to sleep in the same bed—and certainly without sexual intent. When those who see a strong lesbian subtext in this story have noted the constant use of the phrase “my Beloved” by the two romantic friends, scholars veiling the bed also note that this phrase need not connote erotic intimacy, that it was, indeed, common usage among romantic friends of the period about whom there has never been a whiff of homosexuality.
In my view, what we now know about the real meaning of many such romantic friendships in the past leads to the ineluctable conclusion that Eleanor and Sarah were lovers in every sense of the word—that their determination, against all odds, to elope to Wales and set up house together was a determination to live the ideal of romantic friendship completely, in their bed as well as in their garden and library.
It is a testimony to the depths of homophobic prejudice running through Western cultural (and intellectual) life for so many centuries, that those of us who are gay and lesbian, and who know quite well the meaning of the stories we’re encountering when we read narratives like Eleanor’s and Sarah’s, should even now have to confront critics who want to erase the text of such stories, along with the lives of the gay and lesbian people who crafted these texts.
It is a testament to the ravenous need of homophobia to make our lives invisible, even today, that we are still not permitted to celebrate such love stories without fending off ludicrous theories designed to conceal the obvious, clumsy, obtrusive bed in the single shared bedroom. Which I am certain my ancestors, who would have been the servants making that bed and stoking the fire to keep the ladies warm in bed, would have known how to read with unerring certainty for what it was: the bed of two women who loved each other passionately and devotedly to the end of their lives.
In fact, the first traces I can find of Valentine Ryan’s parents John Ryan and Margaret Oates in the early 1800s indicate to me that John lived on the Bessborough estate and worked for the Ponsonby family. He was subsequently to move to the Ponsonby villages of Harristown and Milltown, north of Piltown, which further suggests to me a connection to the Ponsonbys—the connection of a laborer to the family of landed gentry on which he and his family depended.
And so I read anything I can find about the Ponsonbys, in the hope of finding clues that will help me understand the conditions under which these Irish ancestors of mine, who were to emigrate to America in 1852, lived. My ongoing quest for information that might assist me in this search led me to The Ladies of Llangollen.
Having said that, I should also note that this book has been on my “to-read” list for years, when I first saw it in a bookstore in Toronto in the late 1970s. The story it tells cannot fail to fascinate anyone interested in the history of gay relationships. It’s a romantic, alternately heartening and grim, story of two upper-class Anglo-Irish women of the late 18th and early 19th century who fell in love with each other and decided, against many odds, to share their lives.
Eleanor was from a branch of the aristocratic Butler family of Co. Kilkenny that had managed both to remain Catholic and to hold onto its land—a difficult feat in a country whose laws hinged ownership of property on the renunciation of the “old religion” of Catholicism. Bookish and retiring, she did not encourage potential suitors, and her family decided to remedy the problem of Eleanor by sending her to a convent in France.
Sarah was from a cadet branch of the Bessborough Ponsonbys, and she shared Eleanor’s determination not to marry. Both women were attracted to the notion of a life in retirement from society that was becoming influential in various parts of Europe in the latter half of the 18th century following Rousseau: a life of seclusion in a “natural” setting, in which one could read, study the classics and various languages, paint, dance, garden, gothicize (and in the case of Eleanor, harangue and bully one’s servants on a daily basis).
In short, Eleanor and Sarah wanted what was not easily provided for upper-class women of their period who refused to marry, enter a convent, or live the marginal lives of spinsters pitied and provided scraps by their married siblings and other family members. They wanted lives of their own. Together.
And so they made plans to elope together, and in 1778, they did just that, Sarah jumping from the parlor window of relatives, Lord and Lady Fownes, with whom she was living, her little dog Frisk in her arms. She then joined Eleanor and the two went to Waterford to catch the ferry to Wales. They were dressed as men.
Unfortunately, the ferry was running on Irish time, and did not appear as scheduled, so the eloping couple hid in a barn. Where their outraged relatives found them in a day or so, forcing both to return home.
This did not deter the couple, and at their first opportunity, Eleanor and Sarah flew the coop again, this time crossing successfully over to Wales. Where they settled by 1780 in a modest stone cottage, Plas Newydd, near Llangollen. They made this their home up to Eleanor’s death in 1829 and Sarah’s in 1832, attracting streams of visitors including Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, and the positive attention of members of the British and French royal families.
Their days at Plas Newydd were spent gardening, reading and writing, drawing and painting, learning languages, improving their house and its grounds: in short, they did precisely what they had intended to do when they ran off together, living as a couple in (relative) control of their own lives, despite their families’ discontent with the choice they had made. They shared one bed. All their books were marked with Eleanor’s initials on front and Sarah’s on back. In correspondence and diaries, they refer to each other persistently as “my Beloved.” It’s important to note, of course, that their upper-class status provided them the relative freedom they needed to live in this way. Women of less privileged backgrounds who fell in love with each other at the time could most likely only dream of what Eleanor and Sarah had accomplished.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby were understood to be “romantic friends,” a phrase that, at this period, did not necessarily connote erotic attachment, but which referred to the devotion of two friends who had determined to mingle their lives in the pursuit of ideals admired by the Romantic period, including solitude and a harmonious relationship to nature. Even in their lifetimes, however, there were strong hints and widely circulated rumors that the couple were more than merely “friends,” that they were, in fact, lovers.
And so they endured considerable scorn from some highly placed members of society who hinted that Eleanor was the man and Sarah the woman in a grotesque ménage that defied natural law, social convention, and Christian moral teaching. As with women in almost any period of history seeking to live independent of male control, they had unrelenting, brutal problems obtaining money to support themselves. Both of their families, for the most part, shunned and refused them financial succor.
Even so, they managed. They not only endured; they prevailed. And despite the rumors of their Sapphic involvement, they enjoyed the esteem and protection of the villagers of Llangollen and widespread support from the many writers and scholars who admired them for their devotion to their romantic ideals.
As with any such love story from the pre-Freudian period of Western history, there has been ongoing controversy about whether Eleanor and Sarah were, in fact, lovers. Even those who admired and supported them frequently spoke of them as virgins: they were admired and supported, in part, because of the understanding that they were single women who had eschewed marriage and sexual involvement in order to fulfill intellectual interests.
As with Lincoln and even Whitman, scholars who have noted the inconvenient fact that Eleanor and Sarah shared a bed have often preferred to draw a veil around said bed, noting that it was customary for people of the same sex, up to relatively recently, to sleep in the same bed—and certainly without sexual intent. When those who see a strong lesbian subtext in this story have noted the constant use of the phrase “my Beloved” by the two romantic friends, scholars veiling the bed also note that this phrase need not connote erotic intimacy, that it was, indeed, common usage among romantic friends of the period about whom there has never been a whiff of homosexuality.
In my view, what we now know about the real meaning of many such romantic friendships in the past leads to the ineluctable conclusion that Eleanor and Sarah were lovers in every sense of the word—that their determination, against all odds, to elope to Wales and set up house together was a determination to live the ideal of romantic friendship completely, in their bed as well as in their garden and library.
It is a testimony to the depths of homophobic prejudice running through Western cultural (and intellectual) life for so many centuries, that those of us who are gay and lesbian, and who know quite well the meaning of the stories we’re encountering when we read narratives like Eleanor’s and Sarah’s, should even now have to confront critics who want to erase the text of such stories, along with the lives of the gay and lesbian people who crafted these texts.
It is a testament to the ravenous need of homophobia to make our lives invisible, even today, that we are still not permitted to celebrate such love stories without fending off ludicrous theories designed to conceal the obvious, clumsy, obtrusive bed in the single shared bedroom. Which I am certain my ancestors, who would have been the servants making that bed and stoking the fire to keep the ladies warm in bed, would have known how to read with unerring certainty for what it was: the bed of two women who loved each other passionately and devotedly to the end of their lives.
