Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, colloquially known as the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together in North Wales for 51 years in a cottage that they renovated and designed to suit their tastes, on an estate where they built gravel footpaths wending through perfectly lush gardens planted with all manner of shrubs, flowers, fruit trees and bushes, and vegetables. They embraced the “rural retirement” so admired and extolled by eighteenth century philosophers, poets, and artists; and presented their domestic arrangement as the rare but mostly acceptable “romantic friendship” written about in novels and poems. The inscription on Sarah Ponsonby’s tomb is no accident. The Ladies of Llangollen were a queer couple who dedicated their lives to one another, and to the home they built and shared in North Wales – and this month we’re lifting up stories of queer and trans folks in history, beginning with these two reclusive (but bizarrely public) Irish women who eloped to Wales together.
Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen
Written and researched by Averill Earls, PhD
Produced by Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Sarah: Sarah Ponsonby’s epitaph begins, “She did not long survive her beloved companion LADY ELEANOR BUTLER with whom she had lived in the valley for more than half a century of uninterrupted friendship.”[1]Sarah and Eleanor, colloquially known as the Ladies of Llangollen <thl-ahn-go-thlen, but with a lisp?>, lived together in North Wales for 51 years in a cottage that they renovated and designed to suit their tastes, on an estate where they built gravel footpaths wending through perfectly lush gardens planted with all manner of shrubs, flowers, fruit trees and bushes, and vegetables. They embraced the “rural retirement” so admired and extolled by eighteenth century philosophers, poets, and artists; and presented their domestic arrangement as the rare but mostly acceptable “romantic friendship” written about in novels and poems.
Averill: The inscription on Sarah Ponsonby’s tomb is no accident. By framing her “beloved” as a “friend”, she preserved the public image of the Ladies of Llangollen as chaste, just two passionate women joined in intellectual pursuits in a comfortable country retirement. And perhaps they were “just friends”; while we have a remarkable archive of their own writings, the writings of others who observed them, and the writings of yet others who suspected something more sexual was afoot, we can’t say for certain what level of intimacy Sarah and Eleanor shared. But no matter the specific details of their sexual or asexual life together, there is no denying that the life they built together defied expected and accepted gender and sexual norms for the time period. The Ladies of Llangollen were a queer couple who dedicated their lives to one another, and to the home they built and shared in North Wales – and this month we’re lifting up stories of queer and trans folks in history, beginning with these two reclusive (but bizarrely public) Irish women who eloped to Wales together.
I’m Averill Earls
And I’m Sarah Handley-Cousins
And We are your historians for this episode of Dig.
Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Karl, Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, and Susan! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.
Averill: As always, the work we do on this podcast is built on the excellent scholarship of other historians. Today’s episode draws heavily from the most recent works on the Ladies, specifically Natalie Reynolds article on the peculiarities of their cottage ornee style, and Fiona Brideoake’s examination of the Ladies within the contexts of gender and sexuality in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; and, less recently, the first co-biography of the Ladies, written by Elizabeth Mavor in 1971. Brideoake in particular did a lot of heavy lifting to challenge the narrow ways that scholars have, since the 1970s, framed the Ladies relationship. Typically scholars have forced the ladies into one of two boxes: either a romantic (chaste) friendship, or as a butch-femme lesbian prototype. In truth, it is hard to so neatly categorize the Ladies, and in overemphasizing how we might define them, scholars have neglected and missed opportunities to explore what the Ladies’ extraordinary life together in North Wales can tell us about the world in which they lived. I’m not doing any theoretical work in this episode – I think simply acknowledging the queerness, broadly conceived, of their life together is sufficient – and I am probably replicating this problem of over-focusing on their relationship.
But there’s a reason for that! This series is in celebration of the publication of my solo-authored book, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-72! Which comes out June 20, and is available now for pre-order. It’s Pride month in the US, so well timed on the part of my publisher, and I’m very proud of the book and the work I’ve done to uncover the stories of queer working and middle class men of Dublin. When we were talking over topics for this series, though, I wanted to tell some of the stories that are conspicuously absent in my book – namely, queer Irish women. Ireland has a distinct lesbian history problem – in that historians (myself included) have done so very little on queer Irish women. The Ladies of Llangollen are some of the only queer Irish women for whom there is a good bit of scholarship – so lacking any more developed options, I decided to learn a little bit more about these famous Ladies, and bring their story to you.
I hope you’ll dig deeper with Brideoake’s book, which is theory heavy in the first few chapters but then gets really interesting around Chapter 3, and, of course, order a copy of my book, Love in the Lav!
[shovels]
Sarah: As the story goes, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler eloped in 1778. According to Fiona Brideoake and Elizabeth Mavor, it isn’t just a story. There’s quite the deep archive evidencing the dramatics of the Ladies’ efforts to run away together.
Averill: Both Ponsonby and Butler came from well-established Irish families. The Ponsonbys were of the “Protestant ascendency,” meaning they arrived in Ireland with Cromwellian conquest of 1649-53, and Cromwell granted her ancestors land in Kilkenny. The Butlers were Catholic nobility, having arrived in Ireland with King John 1185, and at Eleanor’s birth held the seat of the Duke of Ormonde at Kilkenny Castle.[2] I’ve seen historians describe both the Ponsonbys and Butlers as “newcomers,” which tells you a great deal about the politics of indigeneity, land, and identity in Ireland which persisted well after Irish independence from Britain in 1921, into the 1970s, though is less common today.
Sarah: Eleanor Butler was born in 1739 in France. While her older sisters were boarded in Paris with the Blue Nuns, Eleanor was sent to an English Benedictine House at Cambrai. Though the Benedictines were not as fashionable as the Blue Nuns, Eleanor received an excellent education, was fluent in French, and well-read in literature, history, and philosophy. Eleanor refused to marry, but managed for years to evade her mother’s determination to send her to either a convent or a husband. Caroline Hamilton, who was Sarah’s relative, described Butler as “masculine, satirical, and (at the age of 29) awkwardly unmatched.”[3] Unsurprisingly, Sarah Ponsonby saw the much older Eleanor differently, and, according to historian Elizabeth Mavor, Sarah described Eleanor as “uncommonly handsome.”[4]
Averill: Eleanor and Sarah met when the former was 29, and the latter a 13-year-old student at Mrs. Parkes’s boarding school. Yes, cringey and gross by today’s standards, we know. Sarah’s guardian, Lady Betty Fownes, had asked Eleanor’s mother to watch over Sarah’s progress at the boarding school, and Eleanor had taken on that task. Eleanor enjoyed instructing Sarah in English literature, and their friendship grew through correspondence over the next six years.
Sarah: Sarah Ponsonby was born in 1755. Her mother died when she was 3, and her father when she was 7. Orphaned, her guardians sent her to boarding school. In contrast to Eleanor Butler, Sarah was described by a family member, Caroline Hamilton, as “slight and good looking.”[5]
Averill: Side note: This gendered language for describing the two and their physical appearance would ultimately be the fodder for scholars to categorize them as a “butch-femme” couple, a reductive but oft-used concept in reclamation LGBT history, in other words, when scholars identify people in the past who had relationships with people who seemed to be of the same gender and then “claim” them as gay, bi or lesbian. This practice of history was important during the lesbian and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, because it was “proof” that gay and lesbian people had always existed. And to some extent that is true – because there were same-sex desiring people at all times in all places around the world. But they didn’t all have or use words like “gay” or “lesbian” to self-identify or mark their socio-political roles. So it’s important to sort of tease those nuances out.
Sarah: Little is known about their early relationship or intimacy, other than that they met when Sarah was a student, and that they wrote to one another regularly in the years that followed. In May 1773, when she was 18, Sarah left Mrs. Parke’s School to live with Lady Betty and Sir William Fownes. Soon after, she started writing to friends about Sir William’s unwanted sexual advances.[6] At the same time, Eleanor’s mother had, by then, resolved to send her to a convent. Mrs. Butler couldn’t deal with having a 34 year old spinster daughter and a recently converted son. Eleanor’s brother converted to Protestantism to consolidate his assets and station in the UK, because this was a time when the Penal laws were still preventing Catholics from serving in parliament, inheriting undivided land, etc.[7] So since she couldn’t pull him back to Catholicism, Mrs. Butler decided the best thing for the family, and her unmarried daughter, was making a nun of her.
Averill: From at least 1777 Eleanor and Sarah started making a plan via their correspondence to elope to England and live together there. After a year of planning, they made the attempt. On March 30, 1778, Sarah (allegedly) left her guardians’ house via window, and the two dressed in “men’s clothes,” with Eleanor carrying a pistol, and headed for Waterford to catch a boat to Wales.[8] They were, without much trouble, caught by Lady Betty and Butler’s brother-in-law, Morgan Kavanagh, a day later. Lady Betty wrote upon their discovered escape to her friend Mrs. Goddard: “My dear Mrs Goddard I cant Paint our distress. My dr Sally lept out of a window last Night and is gon off. We learn Miss Butler of the [Kilkenny] Castle is wt her. I can say no more. Help me if you can. We are in the utmost distress and I am sure you pitty us. God Bless you. ever Yours E.F.”[9] Fiona Brideoake reads the suggestion of a sexual “open secret” in this hastily scrawled note, particularly because, after mentioning that Sarah went off with Eleanor, Lady Betty could “say no more.” As Brideoake suggests, “Butler and Ponsonby’s relationship was characterized by the unspoken, yet palpably present, threat of sexual transgression, which is only held at bay by the most active of cognitive refusals.”[10]
Sarah: Kavanagh and Lady Betty forcibly separated Sarah and Eleanor. Sarah fell ill with a fever, and was confined for a few days. Lady Betty wanted to blame the elder Eleanor, and was pleased when news came that the Butlers planned to send their daughter to a convent in France. But Sarah insisted that the decision to abscond had been mutual. Though she’d been 13 when they’d met, by 1778 Sarah was 23, and strong in her convictions and love for Eleanor.
Averill: Lady Betty was, unsurprisingly, concerned about how romantic the friendship had grown between Eleanor and Sarah. The suggestion that the two wanted more than chaste friendship from one another was apparently widespread gossip; Lady Betty wrote to Mrs Goddard “I hear they say these two friends must not live together. I cant help thinking as they do.”[11]
Sarah: Despite her concerns, in the weeks after their first absconding attempt, Lady Betty allowed Butler and Ponsonby to spend enough time together for the two to make another plan to elope. Eleanor fled her brother-in-law’s house, and was able to hide in Sarah’s cupboard, with the help of Sarah’s maid Mary Caryll, for three days. Lady Betty must have seen the determination in the two to be together, because at that point she and her husband wrote to the Butlers seeking resolution. The Butlers stayed firm on their plan to send Eleanor to a convent for 10 days, before finally giving in. On April 28, Butler’s father sent his solicitor “to make provision for the Ladies to depart together.”[12] Sir William tried to convince them to stay in Ireland, promising that his advances were “not meant as she understood it,” and to double her annuity if she did.[13] She did not.
Averill: Mrs. Goddard, who’d been involved in the drama through her friendship with the family, said that she attempted to counsel Sarah against the plan, writing “I spoke to her with harshness and freedom, said [Butler] had a debauched mind, no ingredients for friendship that ought to be founded on virtue.” Sarah responded that she intended to “live and die with Miss Butler.”[14] And that she did.
Sarah: On May 4, 1778, the Ladies, along with Sarah’s devoted servant Mary Caryll, left Woodstock. Four days later they boarded a ship in Waterford, and landed in Wales on May 9, 1778. They would never return to Ireland.[15] Sarah chronicled their month-long tour of the Welsh countryside in her journal, which she titled An Account of a Journey in Wales, Forme’d in May 1778 by Two Fugitive Ladies, and Dedicated to Her most tenderly Beloved Companion By The Author. Shrewdly, they’d selected Wales as their destination for a number of timely reasons. At the time, North Wales was the picturesque spot for tourists, especially noble/elites, like those in their social circles.[16] Llangollen, where they’d ultimately settle, was on the Holyhead Road – the most traveled path from England to Ireland – which made it a popular resting place. The Llangollen valley was, as Nicole Reynolds notes, fashionably rustic, “sufficiently remote and isolated from urban vice, yet still connected to the larger world.”[17]
Averill: About a month into their travels, Sir William died, and Lady Betty followed him three weeks later. Without further guarantee of funds then from the Fowneses, Sarah and Eleanor took lodgings in Llangollen, a “small and poor town…where the refined lover of picturesque scenes, the sentimental, or the romantic can give a fuller indulgence to his inclination.”[18] The next year they moved into a five-room, two-storey cottage on four acres of land, which they rented for a little under 23 pounds/year and named Plas Newydd <Plass Now-ee-da>(New Hall, in Welsh).
Sarah: They lived together in Llangollen for 51 years. They broke into the local gentry scene through friendship with Anne Hill-Trevor, Lady Dungannon and grandmother of the future Duke of Wellington. She helped them make connections with the various dignitaries of North Wales. They hosted dinners as well as tourists, which facilitated many of the “donations” that rounded out their annuities from family members and, later, the government. Their income was a combination of annuities and what they earned by selling hay, potatoes, and barley from their farm. For the first few years they received a 200 pound annuity from Butler’s father and 80 from Lady Betty’s daughter, which was what they considered poverty–and was, in comparison with most of the other landed gentry and nobles they hob-knobbed with–but was considerably more than their working class neighbors in Llangollen.[19] They and their staff, generally between one and ten servants, grew a good deal of their food on the four acres, raised chickens and cows, and worked with locals to provide their other meat, soap, and other needs.
Averill: I think the cast of characters who rounded out their little homestead are worth mentioning. Their constant servant was Mary Caryll, who’d traveled with them in May 1778 from Waterford to Wales, and stayed with them for the rest of their collective lives. She was almost certainly a friend to the ladies more than a servant by the end of their lives. According to the editor of one of Eleanor’s journals, Mary’s “dignified social standing may be assumed because the Ladies … paid for her hair powder.”[20] They employed another five servants: Molly Jones, who worked in the kitchen, though she was discharged, reinstated, discharged again when she got “the itch”, and reinstated “once cured.” Gwendolen was a housemaid who was “according to the Ladies, a pattern for all who followed”; Peggeen, an “indispensable ‘daily’ and maid of all work; and Edward Parry, a footman who was eventually found to be “too expensive” and after firing him, the Ladies only employed women for indoor work. The Ladies also paid someone they just called The Irish Woman, or I.W., who was their personal postwoman and trusted messenger. They employed a rotating and much-abused gardening staff who saw to the acres of rose gardens, topiary, and other growing things. Only a “Simon” found longevity in the Ladies employ.[21]
Sarah: In addition to the human staff that kept Plas Newydd running, the Ladies kept a small menagerie of pets. They nearly always had at least one cow, first Margaret, then Glory, Linda (who walked all the way from Bristol to Plas Newydd), Primrose, and Beauty, whom Elizabeth Mavor, an editor of a collection of Butler’s journals, says was “perhaps the most loved of all.” They usually had a dog or two – Flirt, their first dog at Llangollen; Rover was her son; Bess and Gypsey, her daughters; Sapho; and Phillis, who had belonged to Lady Dungannon who the Ladies took in because Lady Dungannon was not “permitted to take him when she retired to Hampton Court.” Their cats included Tatters, who lived to be an astonishing 18; Thom; Babet; Muff, who was sadly lost in a snowdrift; Brandy; and Gillian.[22]
Averill: The Ladies, with all these mouths to feed and salaries to pay, not to mention some expensive tastes, struggled to live on less than 300 pounds a year, which was made worse in 1783 when Butler’s father died, and they lost most of their income. The next year Eleanor’s brother John granted them a 200 l annuity, and a gift of 500 l, which helped them pay off debts.[23] Remarkably, they had several family members petition to have them placed on the Civil Lists of first Ireland (Butler, by way of herfriend Lady Frances Douglas) for 100l a year after 1787, and then England (Ponsonby, by way of the Duke of Wellington, their neighbor’s grandson) for 200l a year in 1829. The Civil List funds did not always pay out on time or, for several years in a row, at all, but between those remarkable string-pullings and the semi-regular gifts from family members and visitors, and the modest income they earned from what they farmed, the two were able to live fairly comfortably in Wales for most of their lives.
Sarah: Elizabeth Mavor notes the precociousness of the Ladies, who made friends of enemies and enemies of friends with a kind of comical regularity. The Barrett sisters, who were “deep and intense” friends of the Ladies, for example, fell out with the Ladies when they parked their carriage at the Hand Inn when the Ladies were “conducting a vendetta against the proprietor.”[24] Even Lady Dungannon, who was essential in making introductions to Ponsonby and Butler to the local dignitaries and landed gentry and, most significantly, her grandson Arthur Wellesley, is described as “yet another Irish friend. She was the Duke of Wellington’s grandmother, spendthrift, eccentric, and on occasion exceedingly tedious. (See also ENEMIES).”[25]
Averill: They had a series of feuds with proprietors and workers from the town, including Mr. Edwards (of the Hand Inn), Donnes the tailor, “frequently unable to measure up to the exacting standards of the Ladies in the matter of riding habits, [but]…pleased sufficiently…to be retained,” and various “joiners, plasterers, apothecaries, odd-job men, gardeners, sightseers, and, in particular chimney sweeps.”[26] Though some targets of their ire were more deserving – like her brother and sister-in-law Lord and Lady Ormonde, whom Eleanor maintained had cheated her of her portion of the inheritance when their father died – many of these fallings-out were undoubtedly affectations of two women who were cultivating an air of eccentricity and oddity about them. Eleanor’s journal entries are humorous, filled with equal parts genuine delight and hyperbole regarding the beautiful place in which they lived and the people they encountered. But always, throughout her writings, she speaks reverently and lovingly of Sarah, aka Sally, aka “my beloved.”
Sarah: “May 7, 1784 – My Beloved and I went to walk in the fields by Pegwern.”[27]
Averill: “January 5, 1788 – My beloved and I went the Home Circuit – fed Margaret [the cow] who followed us from the Pales to the Melon ground door… Bought a whip from Davies the sadler. … Reading Sterne to my Sally she netting a purse.”[28]
Sarah: “April 18, 1790 – Planted Scotch fir. Sent for Evan the Clog maker to water them, then my beloved and I went to the quarry and planted seven Scotch fir there. Then we took the most delicious walk behind Pen-y-Coed. Returned over the Penwern Road. The country superb.”[29]
Averill: “April 21, 1790 – My beloved and I ran the Home Circuit enjoying the rain.”[30]
Sarah: “May 24, 1799 – My better half and I went to Llantysilio church…. My beloved and I went to prayers in the village. Spoke to Ned of the Mill.”[31]
Averill: As Patricia Hampl notes, though the Ladies allowed – even invited – people into their home and grounds, if they’d had a choice they’d probably have eschewed most company. But needs must, and all that. Notably, for the most part, they themselves rarely left home, broadly speaking. They took regular walks around their property, following a number of preferred paths through gardens, fields, the woods, over the stream that ran through the property, and into town. They spent rainy days reading in the library, or, in the early years, decorating rooms in their house. Butler’s journals reflect the quaint, restful life that a “rural retirement” was supposed to produce. She represents herself and “her beloved Sally” as aloof, educated interlopers in an amusingly provincial countryside.
Sarah: For example, on Thursday, January 1, 1789, “Shannette, the reputed witch of the village, brought us for a new year’s gift a large parcel of apples Tied up in a neat white napkin. I met her as she was coming in with her gift. She insisted on kissing my hand. A complement I could well have excused, but could not avoid for fear of giving her pain. I think my hand feels chilled and numbed since…” Not to cross the “witch,” Butler gave “Shanette” 1s for her gift. But most days it was just her and Sarah, fully appreciative of the peace and quiet afforded to them by their idyllic little slice of Welsh heaven. Of course Mary and likely some other servants were there too, but those weren’t particularly important details beyond the wages the Ladies paid them. Hampl says “The retired life was the cloistered life. Secular nuns.”
(Eleanor Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, ed. Elizabeth Mavor, on Archive.org)
Averill: Plas Newydd–the cottage–was itself essential to the virtuous retirement that the two created for themselves in the countryside. Cottagecore was as popular in the 18th century as it is today. Artists and poets lauded it for the presumed “return” to a simpler life, away from the “follies and vicissitudes of city life,” where “rural virtues” like “hard work, happy leisure, harmony with nature, hospitality, moderation, filial affection, conjugal felicity,” and, of course, sexual chastity persevered. We see this kind of veneration of the rural in Marissa’s work on wetnursing as well. Elite families typically preferred “country wetnurses” because they believed women who came up from the country were healthier, more moral, and uncorrupted by the vices of the city. If I’m not mistaken, a number of the young women that Marissa is writing about in her book passed themselves off as country girls, in an effort to gain employment and even sometimes garnish a better wage for their bodywork.[32]
Sarah: But of course most of the elite of British and Irish society weren’t interested in living in the truly humble laborer’s cottage, just like cottagecore is more of an aesthetic and hobby than a lifestyle, with social media influences curating a vision of their “rustic” life to promote tradwifery/conservative values and/or their Amazon affiliates list rather than the necessity of doing things by hand because you have to. Some bought or built truly basic cottages – called “rustic,” primitive, or Old English style – where they escaped on weekends. Men and women like Ponsonby and Butler bought cottages, and then reformed them into something else entirely – the cottage ornee, decorated and refurbished and expanded with Gothic, Chinese, Italian, Indian, or Egyptian motifs.[33]
Averill: Among their more intriguing pursuits was the extensive renovations and additions they made to their home in Llangollen, transforming the “low-roofed Cot” (as Williams Wordworth described it in an 1824 poem), into a cottage ornee. On the exterior, the Ladies collected ornate oak carvings from pieces of furniture and church fittings, which they arranged in a sort of patchwork around the doorways and windows of the first floor. Many of the carvings were gifts from visitors. The carvings ranged in age from the medieval to the baroque. The Ladies also updated many of the windows with stained glass, and above the first floor the exterior was decorated in a Gothic-style black-and-white trim and carvings. For the interior, Ponsonby and Butler installed a sizable Gothic library – somewhat controversially, as libraries in the 18th century were almost exclusively masculine spaces – where they spent many a day reading together and discussing their literary finds.[34] Their entry hall included baroque oak paneling, and they entertained guests in their carefully and Gothically decorated parlor. The Plas Newydd grounds range from formal ‘parterre’ and rose gardens to beautiful woodland and dell areas where the ‘Cyflymen’ (fast flowing one) stream, all this set against the backdrop of the beautiful Welsh hills.
Sarah: The house was central to their cultural capital. In keeping with a growing tourism industry centered around cottage and estate tours, the Ladies allowed all manner of visitors to tour the grounds and interior (or at least the bottom floor) of Plas Newydd. Mary Caryll, their live-in servant, gave tours to the region’s “dignitaries and first families, English and foreign aristocracy, members of parliament, rank and file middle class tourists, and groups of peasants,” and reportedly earned a considerable salary for her trouble.[35] Though they might turn some away, depending on their mood and need, the Ladies utilized the public display of their home and domesticity to maintain their rural retirement. The ladies created hand-made crafts to gift to particularly generous benefactors, like watercolor renderings of Plas Newydd and an architectural rendering of the ground floor, and copies of garden inscriptions. They were shrewd, possibly also genuine, in their deployment of the cottage in serving their life there. They also invited the assessment of these visitors – who obliged, publishing reviews far and wide, from the romantic poets Anna Seward and William Wordsworth to lesser known writers like Reverend Evans. As Reynolds notes, there were many contributors to the Ladies fame and the fame of Plas Newydd. Newspapers and other periodicals published engravings of the cottage, as well as “sensationalized accounts of the Ladies’ elopement, and notices of their most recent activities.”[36] Not all attention was wanted, however, and could even be dangerous.
Averill: In 1790, for example, London’s General Evening Post published an article about the Ladies.
Miss Butler and Miss Ponsonby have retired from society into a certain Welch Vale. Both Ladies are daughters of the great Irish families whose names they retain. Miss Butler, who is of the Ormonde family, had several offers of marriage, all of which she rejected. Miss Ponsonby, her particular friend and companion, was supposed to be the bar to all matrimonial union, it was thought proper to separate them, and Miss Butler was confined. The two Ladies, however found means to elope together. But being soon overtaken, they were each brought back by their respective relations. Many attempts were renewed to draw Miss Butler into marriage. But upon her solemnly and repeatedly declaring that nothing could induce her to wed any one, her parents ceased to persecute her by any more offers. Not many months after, the ladies concerted and executed a fresh elopement. Each having a small sum with them, and having been allowed a trifling income the place of the retreat was confided to a female servant of the Butler family, who was sworn to secrecy as to the place of their retirement. She was only to say that they were well and safe and hoped that their friends would be without further enquiry, continue their annuities, which has not only been done but increased…. Miss Butler is tall and masculine, she wears always a riding habit, hangs her hat with the air of a sportsman in the hall, and appears in all respects as a young man if we except the petticoats which she still retains. Miss Ponsonby, on the contrary, is polite and effeminate, fair and beautiful. … They live in elegance, neatness and taste. Two females are their only servants. Miss Ponsonby does the duties and honours of the house, while Miss Butler superintends the gardens and the rest of the grounds.[37]
Sarah: This newspaper article, which distilled the couple down into recognizable gendered roles, did not actually reflect the reality of their shared household as described in Sarah’s letters to friends and family, or in Eleanor’s near-daily journaling. Recognizing the danger of the invectives in the story, the Ladies consulted Sir Edmund Burke about how to go about suing for libel. The article, after all, suggested that Eleanor was parading as a man–which, if allowed to stand, could get her in legal trouble, and bring unwanted violence down on their household–and they thought they ought to pursue a legal suit to challenge the papers’ representations of them. Burke counseled them not to pursue a libel case, and wrote a response to the paper condemning the unsubstantiated depiction of the Ladies.
Averill: By 1790, Plas Newyyd was well known locally and throughout the United Kingdom. The Ladies had taken great care to avoid the kinds of negative press invoked in the General Evening Post by opening their home to visitors, to show – literally – that they had nothing to hide. Their efforts to control the narrative were largely successful. Following Burke’s recommendation, they canceled their subscription to that paper, and put it behind them. They continued to host visitors and allow tourists to move through their home and grounds. They walked that fine line between outlandish and eccentric, and dangerous and interesting.
Sarah: In addition to regularly entertaining the local gentry and nobility, their home became a stop over for all kinds of people. Though they never returned to Ireland, Irish family members, friends, and notables visited the Ladies frequently. Because they fashioned themselves in this very public way, as a household where Irish parliamentarians and emerging artists and writers and English nobility spent time, there is a quite impressive array of accounts of the Ladies of Llangollen. Many of those accounts are also penned by the Ladies themselves. But many more are correspondences, poems, stories, and journals of other people’s observations of their home, their relationship, and their public personas. Notably, as Brideoake writes, there were many of their contemporaries – and family members – who were concerned about the potential of “debauchery” and “perversity” of the Ladies’ relationship. But as Nicole Reynolds points out, the Ladies worked very hard to cultivate a public perception of their relationship as the coveted female romantic friendship, a concept that had emerged in the eighteenth century to “describe a passionate relationship between two women: a union grounded in shared intellectual pursuits, intensified through letters, and articulated through tropes of sensibility, the pastoral, and the physical–though chastely rendered–intimacy.”[38] The female romantic friendship was both “celebrated and notorious,” because it invited resistance to the traditional paths for women of Ponsonby and Butler’s station.
Averill: How the Ladies chose to present themselves to the world – as captured in the epitaph on Sarah’s tombstone – is significant.[39] When they were in control of the narrative, they defined themselves within the narrower, acceptable terms of the romantic friendship. And undoubtedly there were many elements of the eighteenth-century framework of romantic friendship within their relationship. They were known for a shared passion for literature, which many scholars suggest is what drew them together in the first place at Mrs. Parkes’s school. They wrote to each throughout the years before they eloped, and continued to write about one another with passion and fondness. And they cultivated a warm domesticity in their sensible (though increasingly ornate) country home. They both defied heteronormative expectations of the era, and conformed (in many ways) to the gendered expectations of women of their social standing.
Sarah: But their sexual identities were – during their lifetimes – and are still a matter of intense debate and scrutiny, to the detriment (as Brideoake and Reynolds note) of considering them as cultural icons of the era. The debate over their sexuality has, in some ways, obscured any other consideration of the Ladies. We’re replicating that a bit with this episode, because their queerness is what is most interesting to us, to Averill as a scholar of Irish sexuality. The Ladies were heralded as the textbook case of female romantic friendship by scholars in the 1970s and 80s, particularly Elizabeth Mavor and Lillian Faderman – and then “reclaimed” by lesbian historians in the 1990s and 2000s as early archetypes of the butch-femme couple.[40]
Averill: In her book, Fiona Brideoake insists that assigning the Ladies to one model or the other comes at the cost of understanding the true fluidity and nebulousness of female sexuality in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Perhaps unusefully, the Ladies are often compared to, for example, Anne Lister, who left coded but explicit diaries about her sexual experiences with other women. The Ladies did not leave such overt evidence of their own, but Brideoake’s own reading of the perception of the relationship, particularly the perception that Lady Betty had of the two, suggests that the two had a physical and sexual relationship. Reynolds rightly points out that in many ways the did they/didn’t they question doesn’t matter — because the Ladies themselves wanted people to see them as romantic friends.[41] Within that trope, their “rural retirement” at ages 23 and 39, was central to their public personas. And the rural retirement that they built for themselves–literally and figuratively–was most certainly intended to shore up both the lived experience of the romantic friendship and the public perception of their relationship as a romantic friendship.
Sarah: Despite the firm insistence on the part of the Ladies that theirs was a romantic friendship, speculation continued throughout their lives as to the potential sexual nature of their relationship. Friends and family members like Lady Betty, visitors to their home, and of course various journalists and scandalmongers all penned their suspicions or hopes about the true nature of the Ladies love. Some of those representations were harmless, even flattering, like Wordsworth’s poem which substituted their devotion to each other for their devotion to their house. Some were like the General Evening Post, which invited readers to see this relationship as a farce deserving scorn, or perhaps even something dangerous in need of putting down. But everyone who visited the Ladies were charmed. And Plas Newydd was not just a haven for the ladies. As Patricia Hampl so eloquently put it,
“Wordsworth and Southey composed poems under its low roof; both Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and “stare,” apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron — and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott. Even the Duke of Wellington (a treasured friend) and De Quincey (“coldly received”) — on and on the personages of the age made pilgrimage to the isolated Welsh village on the river Dee. Josiah Wedgwood visited the Ladies to tour and opine about the rock formations of the surrounding “savage” landscape.”
Most visitors stayed a few hours; a few stayed the night at Plas Newyyd, though the Ladies preferred the former if possible, as they “valued their quiet nights à deux, tucked up by the fire… reading aloud to each other from French novels.” They sent their visitors to the Hand Inn, when they weren’t feuding with the proprietor, to preserve their evening peace.
Averill: The Ladies are fascinating, whether read as the epitome of the “romantic female friendship” or as gender transgressive protolesbians or as something wholly indefinable. They were Irish women who loved women, who fashioned a life together for themselves outside the boundaries of acceptable pathways for women of their ilk and station. Their life seemed kind of awesome by any standard I could imagine. They turned their cottage into a home that they obviously loved. They took pride in the things their land produced. They took pleasure in being together in a beautiful coroner of the United Kingdom. And remarkably they had their family’s support – tacitly, in allowing them unmolested passage out of Ireland in the first place, but also explicitly, with annuities and regular gifts that funded their comfortable little life in Llangollen.
Sarah: Even though they insisted they were “romantic friends,” the innuendo of their sexual relationship always threatened to disrupt their domesticity. What consequences awaited them if the townspeople of Llangollen decided their arrangement was morally infectious, like the “tribades” put on trial in the Netherlands earlier in the 18th century? Were they exceptional in their queer domesticity, or simply exceptional in how well-documented their life together was?
Averill: The Ladies were both known to and contemporaries of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, a couple who had the means to marry in 1834 because Lister inherited her family’s estate in West Yorkshire. Lister and Walker’s relationship was largely unknown until Lister’s coded diaries were discovered at Shibden Hall, and later decoded by historian Helena Whitbread.[42] In the US, suffragists who set up homes together were so common that the term “Boston marriage” gained wide circulation. Like the Ladies, Boston marriages were said to be chaste romantic friendships, but there’s enough evidence about some of the “Boston marriages” to poke holes in that assertion.[43] Mary Burleigh and Margaret Grew, for example, were pretty open about their sharing of home and bed within the suffrage circles.[44] And our own Elizabeth has told us a couple of times about Reverend Anna Howard Shaw, who was the life partner of Susan B. Anthony’s niece Lucy.[45] Transgressive behavior in women, especially elite women, was often the subject of comment, ridicule, or investigation.
Sarah: As far as we know, the Ladies of Llangollen are the only documented 18th or 19th century Irish women who made this kind of life for themselves. That’s not to say there weren’t more – I’m sure there were – but we haven’t found evidence of them yet. There would be a number of cohabitating and more identifiably sapphic couples involved in the Irish independence movement in the early 20th century, like Madeline ffrench-Mullen and Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan, and Helena Molony and Evelyn O’Brien. But even their relationships have been relatively obscured and undocumented until very recently, with Mary McAuliffe’s current research.[46] Perhaps, in a country with declining marriage rates from the 18th century on, the commonality of women setting up homes together (and men as well) meant they went unnoticed–until they made the choice to flee Ireland for Wales. One imagines that the Ladies’ pastoral escape would have functioned just as well in Ireland–the island of rolling hills and white stone cliffs and thatch-roofed cottages. But we could see how the public domesticity that they cultivated for themselves, which was really essential to funding their “rural retirement”, required an escape to rural Wales, where their domesticity might be noticed.
Averill: And I think the public persona of this couple is interesting, because it’s very much like a couple that I profile in my book. Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards were two Englishmen who, effectively, fled England to Ireland, where their particular talents – acting, directing, playwriting – and queer domesticity would be noticed. MacLiammoir even pretended to be Irish for 50 years, right up until his death.[47] And they lived in a posh part of town, fixed up their terraced house with classical details and exotic furnishings, adopted cats, hosted wild parties, and produced Oscar Wilde’s plays. They referred to one another as partner for decades, even in public televised interviews. There’s some early evidence in the research I’ve done that there were lots of “confirmed bachelors” living together in Ireland throughout the 20th century – just like the revolutionary lesbian couples we just mentioned – but not a ton of Englishmen (or one Englishman and one Englishman pretending to be Irish). There was something intentional about being the outsiders who came in, set up a public domesticity, and then funded their life and lifestyle through that public identity.
Sarah: In many ways, the Ladies of Llangollen, MacLiammoir and Edwards have given us the gift of visibility. Whatever level of intimacy their relationships took, these were inarguably queer domesticities, challenging the gendered and sexual expectations of their times and places. And because they invited scrutiny and made a spectacle and lived out loud, we have evidence of their queer lives and love. Of course, they all came from positions of immense privilege to begin with — financially, talentedly, hierarchically — which made their invitation of scrutiny and performance of spectacle possible. Their class and status was almost certainly a kind of cushion that allowed them to live out loud.
Averill: Most of my work is focused on those who did not have the means or privilege to live out loud, men who sought anonymous sex in public bathrooms, who were caught and put on trial and imprisoned or lost their jobs. And those men were hard enough to find, buried in vaguely-named court records without a finding aid or road map to understanding them. To find the women – when sex between women wasn’t criminalized in the same way as sex between men – is near impossible. There was no “gross indecency” law for the Irish police to arrest women under. Undoubtedly many in the 20th century were confined in Magdalene laundries, worked and beaten and shamed, enslaved to Catholic penance. Those records belong to the church, which, unsurprisingly, hasn’t relinquished them. So yes, we are fortunate that Ponsonby and Butler not only defied the rules and expectations of their time, but left extensive written records of their affection, business savvy, and 51-year-life together. Even if they insisted to the last word – carved on a tombstone in a mausoleum shared by these two women (and Mary) – that they were just friends. 😉
Sarah: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. We realize that recent changes to curriculum in states like Florida and Texas will complicate being able to use our podcast episodes in the classroom, so please reach out if there’s something we can do to be helpful to you and your classroom. And get a copy of our book, SPIRITUALISM’S PLACE, out now! You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org.
Sarah: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. We realize that recent changes to curriculum in states like Florida and Texas will complicate being able to use our podcast episodes in the classroom, so please reach out if there’s something we can do to be helpful to you and your classroom. You should definitely preorder Averill’s book, Love in the Lav, TODAY! And while you’re at it, get a copy of our book, SPIRITUALISM’S PLACE, out now! You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org.
Bibliography
Averill Earls, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-72, Temple University Press, 2025.
Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism (Bucknell University Press, 2017)
Lady Eleanor Butler, A year with the ladies of Llangollen, edited by Elizabeth Mavor, (Hammondsworth, England)
Lillian Faderman, To believe in women : what lesbians have done for America–a history, (1999)
Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present, (Quill, 1981)
Elizabeth Mavor, < The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Penguin, 1971).
Nicole Reynolds, “Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the Cottage Ornee,” The Eighteenth Century, 51:1-2, (Spring Summer 2010) 211-227.
C.S. Voll, “The Ladies of Llangollen Scandal: The close relationship caused an uproar in Europe,” Medium, July 11, 2020
Patricia Hampl, “The Ladies Who Were Famous for Wanting to be Left Alone,” The Art of the Wasted Day, April 2018, available (excerpted) at LongReads
[1] Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 58.
[2] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 39-42.
[3] Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen, (1971) 5.
[4] Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen, 5.
[5] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 43.
[6] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 43.
[7] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 43.
[8] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 43.
[9] Qtd. in Fiona Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 44.
[10] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 44.
[11] Qtd. in Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 45.
[12] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 45.
[13] Qtd. in Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 45.
[14] Qtd. in Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 45.
[15] Nicole Reynolds, “Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the Cottage Ornee,” The Eighteenth Century, 51:1-2, (Spring Summer 2010) 211-227; 213; Brideoake, 46.
[16] Reynolds, 214.
[17] Reynolds, 214.
[18] Qtd. in Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 47.
[19] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 47.
[20] Eleanor Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, ed. Elizabeth Mavor, 17.
[21] Butler, 17-18.
[22] Butler, 18.
[23] Brideoake, The Ladies of Llangollen, 51.
[24] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 20.
[25] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 20.
[26] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 21.
[27] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 92
[28] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 24.
[29] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 81.
[30] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 81.
[31] Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 103.
[32] Reynolds, 215.
[33] Reynolds, 215.
[34] Reynolds, 219.
[35] Reynolds, 220.
[36] Reynolds, 221.
[37] Qtd. in Butler, A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 135.
[38] Reynolds, 213.
[39] Brideoake, ##.
[40] Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present, (Quill, 1981); Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Penguin, 1971).
[41] Reynolds, 212.
[42] Helena Whitbread, No Priest But Love.
[43] Lillian Faderman, To believe in women : what lesbians have done for America–a history, (1999) 5-9, 20-22.
[44] Faderman, To believe in women 21.
[45] Faderman, To believe in women 27.
[46] Ed. Mary McAuliffe and Harriet Wheelock, The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn: A Life in Letters, (University College Dublin Press, 2022).
[47] Averill Earls, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland 1922-72 (Temple University Press, 2025), Chapter 7.
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