In the early morning of March 30, 1778, a young woman named Sarah Ponsonby sneaks away, dressed as a manfrom a Georgian mansion in Kilkenny, Ireland. He carries a gun and his pet, a little dog named Frisk. She is an orphan, but of good birth: she lives in the house of her cousin, Lady Betty, and her husband, Sir William Fownes.
This gentleman would be more than enough reason to justify the flight: apparently, he plans to marry his protégé as soon as he becomes the widow of Lady Betty, who is weak at heart. But Sara not only tries to avoid the abuse of a fifty-year-old man, but she runs away to meet up with the love of his lifewho lives about twenty-five kilometers away and also wears pants and a jacket.
Is called Eleanor Butler and she is of even higher birth, daughter of the earls of Ormonde. She has no shortage of reasons to flee either. She has now turned thirty-nine years old, she systematically rejects all her suitors and her family, irritated, threatens to send her to a convent.
The romantic getaway ends when their respective families locate them in a barn, where they have spent the night after missing the boat that was to take them to England. Despite the scandal, one detail frees them from social ostracism: as Lady Betty expresses, with relief, at least “there was no man involved.”
The couple does not give up
Sara and Eleanor don’t give up. They are determined to spend the rest of their lives together. In a second attempt, with the help of a maid, Mary Caryll, who accompanies them, they manage to cross the northern channel and finally settle in Wales, in a town called Llangollen, where They buy and renovate a neo-Gothic housethey baptized it Plas Newydd (new mansion, in Gaelic) and there they began a life of «retirement», «feeling» and «delicious seclusion», according to their intimate diaries.
Their declared intention was to live in peace away from the madding crowd, dedicated to tending the orchard and garden, drawing, learning languages and reading Rousseau, occupations financed with the money reluctantly sent to them by Eleanor’s family.
But if they sought to go discreetly unnoticed, it cannot be said that they succeeded. Their masculine clothing and unconventional lifestyle made them famous. They soon attracted a continuous stream of curious people to their house, many of them illustrious: Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Percival Shelley, Sir Walter Scott…
They received praise for their “retreat from the world” and their “noble friendship,” their “singular mutual devotion,” their “erudite conversation,” and their “exemplary life of retreat and learning,” which aroused “curiosity and admiration,” according to various letters from contemporary visitors.
Advances of Romanticism
It was not in vain that these ladies had made Rousseun’s ideal of renouncing the luxuries of high society a reality to cultivate the spirit in an exquisitely rural environment. What was more romantic than that?
Plas Newydd became an essential pilgrimage site for all good romantic. Almost, almost, in what today we would call a tourist destination for influencers. A German prince referred to them as “the most famous virgins in Europe”.
Queen Charlotte was on the verge of visiting them (apparently, she backed out when she found out that the ladies flavored everything with musk, a perfume that she detested) and, although she did not finally get to meet them, she convinced George III to grant them a lifetime pension.
There was something paternalism in this attitude. On the one hand, they were considered delightfully eccentric. On the other hand, ridiculously outdated. They wore men’s riding attire and top hats; They powdered their hair long after this fashion fell into disuse.
They did not stop being two spinsters embarked on what, years later, would be called a “Boston marriage”, a type of union characteristic of intellectual women, which allowed them to avoid marriage and dedicate themselves to cultivating their interests without losing their reputation, but which, at the same time, provoked in many of their contemporaries a certain condescending compassion.
However, on the other hand, the ladies of Llangollen represented the greatest exponent of a concept highly appreciated in the 18th and 19th centuries: romantic friendship between women. It was not frowned upon for two girls to become such close friends as to kiss, exchange tokens of love, write passionate letters, express jealousy towards other women, share bed or even proclaim your desire to stay together forever.
From the sublime to the infamous
Does this mean that British society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was more tolerant than we imagine? Was homosexuality accepted? No, it’s not that simple.
To begin with, relationships between men were not viewed in the same way as relationships between women. Male homosexuality was not only frowned upon, but persecuted and punished as a serious crime.
In 1810, a raid on the White Swan tavern in London, a place that today we would call «social», resulted in twenty-seven arrests, of whom two were hanged and seven sentenced to prison terms. Lord Byron, who was on a grand tour of Europe at the time, reacted to the news with terror, and for good reason.
In 1835, four years after Sara Ponsonby’s death, British justice still executed two men for sodomy. It should be noted, however, that the sentences were not applied, in theory, based on the amorous feelings of the executed, but on their sexual activity. What was punished were sexual relations considered against nature.
Why, then, was society more benevolent towards lesbians than towards gays? Because the notion predominated that women they lacked sexual desire. They were considered incapable of committing unnatural acts and their infatuations were therefore considered platonic and innocent. The whims of old maids.
It could be said that machismo was, paradoxically, what saved the ladies of Llangollen and other couples of women in similar circumstances from the worst consequences of homophobia.
Are you friends or lovers?
Despite the prevalence of this Platonic idealization, female romantic friendships were not free from suspicion and slander, especially when their behavior, as in the case of the ladies of Llangollen, was considered masculine.
In 1791, the General Evening Post published an article about them, titled Extraordinary Female Affection. It suggested that their relationship was sapphic, that is, it was not platonic, but sexual.
Sara and Eleanor were outraged to the point of considering sue the journalist. They even wrote to an influential friend, the MP Edmund Burke, to seek his advice as a lawyer.
Despite sharing their indignation, Burke advised them to refrain from taking legal action and suggested that they console themselves with the thought that they were being persecuted for their virtues. Libel trials, as Oscar Wilde would discover a hundred years later, unfortunately for him, were unpredictable. It could well have backfired on them.
Was the love between Eleanor and Sara physical? There is nothing in his letters and diaries that leads us to think so. However, their fifty years of daily life together seem, in every way, identical to those of any happy marriage. They called each other “my beloved” and “my better half”engraved their intertwined initials on their dinnerware and glassware. What’s more, they even had a dog named Sappho, like the poet from Lesbos.
The writer and mountaineer Anne Lister (1791 – 1840), who did come out of the closet and married, although without legal recognition, her partner Anne Walker (1803 – 1854), was convinced that those elderly ladies, whom she had the opportunity to meet, were much more than friends and residents of Llangollen.
For Anne, they were a role model. They inspired him to decide to live a life free of conventions and prejudices. If for nothing else, the ladies of Llangollen would already deserve recognition as pioneers on the long road towards the recognition of the rights and freedoms of lesbian women, and of the homosexual community in general.
The Vanguard.
GML
