Just Friends: The Ladies of Llangollen

Love in the Lav Series, Episode # 1 of 4. 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.

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)

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