Hermitesses.

The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism By Fiona Brideoake Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017, $110.00 hardcover

Remember Lynne Cheney? A prominent figure in the culture wars of the 1980s, Cheney served as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Reagan and Bush I, and became Second Lady in the Bush II era, when Dick Cheney became vice president. In both jobs, she attacked queer and feminist art and black cultural forms, seeking to censor rap albums and video games in the name of conservative family values.

But get this--in 1981, Lynne Cheney published a novel entitled Sisters, a Western set in nineteenth-century Wyoming, in which the protagonist, Sophie, returns home to Cheyenne after her sister Helen's death, only to meet Helen's beloved Amy. Watching Amy walk arm-in-arm with a new companion, Sophie feels "curiously moved, curiously envious of them... she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave." The book, apparently inspired in part by the story of the Ladies of Llangollen, is now out of print, and in 2004 Cheney refused permission to have it republished, claiming it "was not her best work." In 2007, Lynne's daughter Mary Cheney, then working on her father's Republican election campaign, came out as a lesbian.

You can't make this stuff up, but Fiona Brideoake has brought it all together in her remarkable new book, The Ladies of Llangollen. Incredibly, the story of two Irish spinsters, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, who eloped together in 1777 and made their home in a Welsh cottage for the next fifty years, has never been the subject of a full-length academic study, although their story and writings are now well known to scholars of LGBTQ history and theory, eighteenth-century studies, and Romanticism. Brideoake's ambition in this book, however, is not (or not merely) to construct an accurate portrayal of the lives and influence of Ponsonby and Butler that draws on the last fifty-odd years of scholarship in queer studies. She wants also to describe the "queer revenants" produced by those who have hijacked the Butler and Ponsonby story for their own various purposes since the women first arrived in the dirty little highway town of Llangollen in North Wales, looking for a home. The Ladies of Llangollen, Brideoake shows, meant many things to many people, starting first and foremost with themselves.

For example, Brideoake traces the emergence of the sobriquet "the Ladies of Llangollen" to describe the couple, pointing out that it did not appear in print until after both women were dead, in John Hicklin's 1847 collection, The Ladies of Llangollen, as Sketched by Many Hands. In their lifetime, they were more often known, or called themselves, "two Fugitive Ladies," "the two Hermit Ladies," "Hermitesses," "the recluse ladies." The nickname emerged as they became more famous, and their fame was made possible in part by the nickname. As Brideoake writes, "their collective designation 'the Ladies of Llangollen' elides their individual names, masking the disparity between their powerful families and their anomalous social situation, and displacing their exiled status with the identity of landed locals." The nickname served the interests of both the women themselves and their admirers, Brideoake argues, contributing to "their refashioning from exiled Irish spinsters to indigenous elements of the Welsh cultural and geographical landscape."

Although the couple was celebrated for having forsaken fashionable society for a rural retreat where they could live as they liked, unfettered by the society marriages their families had chosen for them, Llangollen was no backwater. They had originally hoped to settle in England, but the modest incomes their families allowed them made the lower cost of living in Wales more practical. Llangollen was an important staging post on the Holyhead Road, which carried travelers from London to Dublin via ferry and stagecoach. Plas Newydd, their stylishly refurbished "cottage," provided a welcome alternative to the town inn for the stream of fashionable travellers who broke their journeys there. They were able to maintain relationships with wealthy gentry families and celebrities such as Edmund Burke and William Wordsworth without the expense of maintaining a carriage--which Brideoake tells us, would have been the eighteenth-century equivalent of purchasing a helicopter. Llangollen, Brideoake writes, both suggested virtuous retirement and provided Ponsonby and Butler with "as numerous and distinguished a social set--if not more so, given the comparative cost of living--than they could have enjoyed in London or Bath."

This kind of careful image management is also what made it possible for the couple to serve as both an emblem of chaste female friends, women who avoided sexuality by avoiding marriage, and as sexually suspect outsiders whose masculine dress and intimate habits were the subject of newspaper attacks and gossip. Wordsworth wrote them a sonnet extolling their virtue; Byron, in contrast, assumed they were queer kin, writing that his passion for a choirboy would "put Lady E. Butler, & Miss Ponsonby to the Blush." The argument that the sexuality of the Ladies was viewed in seemingly opposite ways is not new--I'm among those who have made it before, in my 1997 book Dangerous Intimacies--but Brideoake gives us a richly detailed account of its material foundations. For example, in renovating their house, Butler and Ponsonby applied carved oak finishes and details onto every interior and exterior surface that could hold them. As a symbol of British loyalty, carved by local Welsh artisans, the heavy ornaments served to literally anchor the "Ladies" in "Llangollen" as members of the local landed gentry, although their pedigrees were Irish (Butler's was even more suspect, being Catholic) and their home a rental until well into their middle age. The landscaping of their small holding also mimicked that of estates hundreds of times its size and the rise of the Welsh cultural revival and picturesque tourism in the late eighteenth century made their assertion of Welshness fashionable.

Their suspected sapphism made the couple the target of attacks, true--but it also served as an inspiration for many self-avowed female lovers of their own sex, both in the lifetime of the Ladies of Llangollen and in the centuries since. Brideoake devotes a fascinating chapter to the revival of interest in them among modernists, in the context of postwar suffragist feminism and interest in same-sex desire. In 1930, a Butler descendant published papers and correspondence of the Ladies that had remained in private hands until then, under the title The Hamwood Papers. Virginia Woolf's 1928 Orlando was also inspired in part by their story. She wrote of her new plans for the novel, "It is to be written as I write letters, at the top of my speed: on the Ladies of Llangollen: on Mrs. Fladgate: on people passing...Sapphism is to be suggested." In 1936, Mary Gordon, one of the first female physicians to qualify in Britain, published a book entitled Chase of the Wild Goose, which described how Butler and Ponsonby visited her in spirit form and demanded that she make their lives known in a new era which could finally appreciate them as, Brideoake summarizes, "spiritual progenitors of the emancipated women of the twentieth century." And Valentine Ackland, the lover of the novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, presented Warner with an ivory toothpick box with a lock of hair framed in the lid, of which Warner wrote, "We decided on no evidence that Sarah Ponsonby gave it to Eleanor Butler." Also on no evidence, the couple decided the hair had belonged to Sarah Ponsonby.

Brideoake concludes with the toothpick-box anecdote as a synecdoche for her larger argument, which demonstrates "the vexed status of evidence within the history of sexuality." We don't ask if childless married heterosexuals of the past "really" loved each other, even though there's usually no concrete evidence that they actually had sex. But in the case of same-sex love, terms like the ones Ponsonby and Butler used for one another--"beloved," "heart's companion," "dear one"--are often dismissed or misread as meaning something other than what they plainly say. Fiona Brideoake's book is a rich and fascinating story of one such history of misreading, and of the queer counter-readings that have always existed alongside it.

Reviewed by Lisa L. Moore

Lisa L. Moore is the author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (2011), which won tahe Lambda Literary Award. She is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Title Annotation:	The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism
Author:	Moore, Lisa L.
Publication:	The Women's Review of Books
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Mar 1, 2018
Words:	1420
Previous Article:	Testimony.
Next Article:	Fear, Hunger, and Fear.
Topics:	Books Book reviews Rap (Music) Rap music