Tuff Muff: Ladies of Llangollen
| 26 May 2010
The year is 1778. Thirty-nine year-old Lady Eleanor Butler and 23-year-old Sarah Ponsonby have developed a deep and passionate attachment.
Despite great family pressure, neither wants to be some man’s wife. Butler alone has refused five proposals. Her worried ma is trying to send her to a nunnery. Sarah herself has had to fight off unwanted male attention. They are sick of being told what to do. They just want to be together, so they decide to elope.
Sadly they are soon dragged back to respectable society by their Irish land-owning families. However, after only a few weeks back home they abscond once more. This time they are determined to find a life outside the suffocating expectations demanded by society. ‘The Ladies of Llangollen’, one of the first female couples in modern European history to live together openly, is born.
Eleanor and Sarah take on Plas Newydd, a cottage in the Welsh town of Llangollen, which over the following decades they transform into a whacky Gothic masterpiece. There they lead a secluded, scholarly life devoting their days to literature, languages and their garden. Soon, word of the unconventional “Ladies” spreads, and they find themselves hosting some of the biggest figures in Georgian society including William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott and the Duke of Wellington. Plas Newydd becomes a place of literary pilgrimage and an inspirational example of graceful, orderly living.
The Ladies remain in their idyllic retreat for 50 years until Eleanor dies in 1829. What a desolate place Plas Newydd must have become after her passing! Indeed, her devoted Sarah lasted only two more years before she followed her love into the hereafter.
So were the Ladies of Llangollen lesbians? While they did share a bed, a quirky man/lady fashion fusion and a dog called Sappho, we must be careful imposing our twenty-first century notions onto their relationship. Whether they had sex or not is open for debate and probably doesn’t really matter that much (although I have been wondering…).
There was a kind of elegance in the way these women lived. They created a radical life together that was of their choosing. Ultimately, their birth privilege made this possible, although Eleanor and Sarah did have to fight damned hard simply to be allowed to live as a couple. And my lordy – don’t we take that for granted today as we stroll through Ikea with our girlfriends, buying wine-racks and yuccas for our lesbian love-nests?
So, for gently opening doors for the lezbos who followed, the quietly tough Ladies of Llangollen are hereby declared this month’s CHERRIE magazine’s Tuff Muffs of the month.
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