a biography of the day-lady eleanor ponsonby and sarah butler
Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler
On June 2, 1829, Lady Eleanor Butler died.
Sarah Ponsonby lived but two more years before again lying down again next to Lady Eleanor as she had every night for 51 years - two women who had "felt themselves bound to give to the world, an example of perfect friendship..." according to a contemporary.
Butler, 39, and Ponsonby, 23, had run away together in 1778 over the violent objections of their fashionable Irish families when Sarah had announced she would "live and die with Miss Butler."
The couple settled in Llangollen, Wales, and created a home and garden of such reputation that even the Queen of England asked for its plans. Dozens of the major figure of the era visited them including Charles Darwin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Sir Walter Scott. The Duke of Wellington was a close friend. William Wordsworth wrote while staying in their cottage.
Butler and Ponsonby, voracious readers and intellectual giants, created a place of peace, of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation that was famous throughout Europe. It was almost a requirement that celebrities visiting England venture into Wales to visit "the ladies."
In Elizabeth Mavor's painstakingly researched and respected book The Ladies of Llangollen, she writes: "I have preferred the terms of romantic friendship (a once flourishing but now lost relationship) as more liberal and inclusive and better suited to the diffuse feminine nature ... such friendships could be before they were biologically and thus prejudicially defined (by Freud). Depending as they did upon time and leisure, they were aristocratic, they were idealistic, blissfully free, allowing for a dimension of sympathy between women that would not now be possible outside an avowedly lesbian connection. Indeed, much that we would now associate solely with a sexual attachment is contained in romantic friends: tenderness, loyalty, sensibility, shared beds, shared tastes, coquetry, even passion."
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