The Ladies of Llangollen

Author: Fiona Brideoake
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611487625
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of “retirement” turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes “proof” of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life—written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday—to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

The Ladies of Llangollen

Author: Elizabeth Mavor
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780953956173
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
All Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby wanted was to live together and devote their lives to each other, so in 1778 they ran away from their aristocratic homes in Ireland to settle in Llangollen, Wales, to devote themselves to delicious seclusion and romantic friendship.

A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen

Author: Lady Eleanor Butler
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
"In 1778, to the fury of their aristocratic families, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped and fled to North Wales, to Llangollen. This charming book is taken from the journal that Eleanor Butler kept of their life together. During their lifetime, its contents aroused much speculation, but no one was permitted to see it and its true nature was protected from prying eyes. In fact, the journal is a delightful record of the ladies' devotion to one another and of the times in which they lived. Elizabeth Mavor's selection includes extracts from the journals themselves, and from the Ladies' Receipt and Account Books, together with a number of unpublished letters, all giving an extraordinarily vivid picture of village life in the late eighteenth century and of the remarkable friendship of the Ladies of Llangollen." -- Amazon.com viewed August 24, 2020.

An account of the ladies of Llangollen (lady E.C. Butler and S. Ponsonby).

Author: John Prichard (D.D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72

Book Description

Intimate Friends

Author: Martha Vicinus
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226855635
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings. Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris. In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

I Know My Own Heart

Author: Anne Lister
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814792483
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
Upon publication, the first volume of Anne Lister's diaries, I Know My Own Heart, met with celebration, delight, and some skepticism. How could an upper class Englishwoman, in the first half of the nineteenth century, fulfill her emotional and sexual needs when her sexual orientation was toward other women? How did an aristocratic lesbian manage to balance sexual fulfillment with social acceptability? Helena Whitbread, the editor of these diaries, here allows us an inside look at the long-running love affair between Anne Lister and Marianna Lawton, an affair complicated by Anne's infatuation with Maria Barlow. Anne travels to Paris where she discovers a new love interest that conflicts with her developing social aspirations. For the first time, she begins to question the nature of her identity and the various roles female lovers may play in the life of a gentrywoman. Though unequipped with a lesbian vocabulary with which to describe her erotic life, her emotional conflicts are contemporary enough to speak to us all. This book will satisfy the curiosity of the many who became acquainted with Lister through I Know My Own Heart and are eager to learn more about her revealing life and what it suggests about the history of sexuality.

The Ladies

Author: Doris Grumbach
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 149767669X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
A tender and imaginative retelling of the adventures of two of history’s most compelling women In 1778 Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left County Kilkenny for Wales to live together as a married couple. Both well born, highly educated Irish women, the Ladies of Llangollen, as they came to be known, defied all eighteenth-century social convention and spent half a century together in a loving relationship. Removed from the intrusive gaze of the world, the fictional Eleanor and Sarah retreat to their shared home to study literature and language and enjoy their solitude. In an imagined account, Doris Grumbach brings this gripping chronicle to new audiences. With a keen sense of the rhythms and routines of longtime partnership, Grumbach breathes vivid life into this fascinating story of a passion both shocking and steadfast.

A Green Equinox

Author: Elizabeth Mavor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1946022691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize, A Green Equinox is a beguilingly Rococo “study of love, considered in turn as companionship, sickness and mystic devotion . . . a book whose unusual infatuations are well worth lingering over, and puzzling out” (Russell Davies, The Observer). Hero Kinoull is an antiquarian bookseller whose sedate life in the picturesque English town of Beaudesert is turned upside down between the spring and autumn equinoxes of a single year. First her quiet but forbidden liaison with Hugh Shafto, the curator of the country’s finest collection of Rococo art, comes to an abrupt halt when she develops an adoration for his straight-talking, do-gooding wife Belle. But this relationship leads to other, even more unexpected feelings for Belle’s widowed mother-in-law, the majestic Kate Shafto, who spends her days tending her garden and sailing her handmade boats in the waters of the miniature archipelago she’s constructed in a disused gravel-pit. Published two years after Elizabeth Mavor’s most famous work, The Ladies of Llangollen—a biography of two eighteenth-century Irish gentlewomen who scandalized their families by eloping to Wales, where they lived together on their own terms—A Green Equinox is itself an intrepid exploration of gender, female sexuality, and passion: romantic, carnal, and cerebral.

The Secret Diaries Of Miss Anne Lister: Vol. 1

Author: Anne Lister
Publisher: Virago
ISBN: 074812571X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
Discover the extraordinary diaries of the real Anne Lister: the inspiration for Gentleman Jack and Emma Donoghue's new novel Learned By Heart 'Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing' SARAH WATERS '[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON 'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history' EMMA DONOGHUE When this volume of Anne Lister's diaries was first published in 1988, it was hailed as a vital piece of lost lesbian history. The editor, Helena Whitbread, had spent years painstakingly researching and transcribing Lister's extensive journals, much of which were written in an elaborate code - what Lister called her 'crypthand', which allowed her to record her life in intimate, and at times, explicit, detail. Until then, Anne Lister's lesbianism had been supressed or hinted at; this was the first time her story had been told. Anne Lister defied the role of nineteenth century womanhood: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller and lesbian - a woman who lived her life on her own terms. These diaries include the years 1816-1824. The second volume, continuing Anne's story, THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER: NO PRIEST BUT LOVE, is now available.

Forbidden Lives

Author: Norena Shopland
Publisher: Seren Books
ISBN: 9781781724101
Category : Sexual minorities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Forbidden Lives explores and uncovers the hidden LGBT history of Wales through portraits of significant LGBT figures and the charting of key social and cultural moments in that history. Norena Shopland, a longstanding researcher and activist, has written an accessible and important first guide to the field which will be widely welcomed.