In the spring of 1778, two women from Ireland’s upper classes abandoned their families and their expected futures, fleeing across the Irish Sea to a small village in Wales. There they lived openly as a couple for more than fifty years, scandalizing and fascinating British society in equal measure. They became known as the Ladies of Llangollen, and their secluded life in a Gothic cottage turned them into one of the most talked-about curiosities of their age. Eleanor Charlotte Butler was born on the 11th of May, 1739, in Kilkenny Castle, into one of Ireland’s most distinguished families.
The Butlers had carved out vast territories in the Irish Midlands during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, eventually rising to become the Earls of Ormond, a lineage among the most senior in the country. Eleanor was the third of four children born to Walter Butler and Ellen Morris. Her father was the heir to the sixteenth Earl of Ormond but never officially acquired the title due to an inheritance crisis. As a young woman, Eleanor was sent to France to be educated in a convent, the Butlers maintaining close ties with Catholic powers on the continent from their temporary exile in the seventeenth century.
She became a voracious reader and highly educated, but she saw little of her family and was regarded by them as a bookish recluse with few social graces. When she returned to Ireland in the late 1750s, she had become fiercely independent and refused to enter an arranged marriage. Sarah Ponsonby came from a more modest but still wealthy and influential family in the Irish Midlands. She was born in Ireland in 1755 to Louisa Lyons and Chambre Brabazon Ponsonby, a member of the Irish Parliament for Newtownards.
Sarah was the only child of her father’s second marriage, but her mother died just three years after her birth. Chambre remarried, taking Mary Barker as his third wife, and the couple had another daughter before Chambre died early in 1762, when Sarah was only six years old, leaving his third wife pregnant with a son who was born four months after his death. Sarah thus became an orphan and was sent to live with relatives in Kilkenny, where she moved in the same social circles as Eleanor, who lived about twenty-five kilometres away. The two first met in 1768, when Sarah was thirteen and Eleanor was twenty-nine, Sarah having been sent to Kilkenny Castle to continue her education under Eleanor’s guidance.
As Sarah grew older, their friendship deepened, and by the mid-1770s the two were in a clandestine relationship, well aware that eighteenth-century society would not tolerate it. Their refusal to marry, however, was becoming a serious problem. Eleanor was well into her thirties, and many of her relatives had given up hope of her ever taking a husband. But Sarah, an orphan, was of an age when pressure was mounting for her to marry and start a family.
There were even murmurs among Eleanor’s family that since she had not married and would not bear children, she should be sent to a convent. It was under this pressure that the couple began to plan an escape. On the night of the 30th of March 1778, they made their first attempt. Dressed as men and armed, they headed for Waterford, hoping to board a boat to Britain.
Their plan was discovered when they were found hiding near the Waterford docks. According to some accounts, Sarah’s dog gave them away, because it would not stop barking. The families tried to persuade them to abandon the scheme, but the women had made up their minds. Two months later, they tried again, and this time they succeeded, crossing the Irish Sea to Wales.
After landing at Milford Haven, they took a scenic tour of the Welsh countryside before deciding to settle in North Wales. They secured the tenancy of a cottage on the outskirts of the village of Llangollen, and in 1780 they purchased the property, naming it Plas Newydd, a Welsh term meaning “new hall” or “new mansion. ” It would be their home for the next half-century and would soon make them minor celebrities across Britain. The cottage was originally a five-bedroom house, large for the region and time but not otherwise remarkable.
Over the years, however, the women transformed it. They altered the facades and added arched window features that made the front of the building resemble the facade of a medieval Gothic cathedral rather than a Welsh farmhouse. They even acquired the medieval high cross that had once stood atop Chester Cathedral but had been torn down during the English Civil War, re-erecting it in their garden. Formal gardens were laid out around the property, and elaborate oak panelling decorated the interior rooms.
The exact nature of Eleanor and Sarah’s relationship has been debated for generations. Historians have wondered whether they were lovers or simply two unusually close women who found comfort in each other’s company while rejecting the social constraints of their time. But the evidence strongly suggests a romantic bond. Eleanor’s extensive diary survived, and in it she repeatedly refers to Sarah as “my beloved.
” The couple also named a succession of pet dogs Sappho, a striking choice given that Sappho, the ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, is the origin of the term “lesbian. ” Whatever the precise character of their relationship, the two women appear to have faced no persecution for it, unlike men in similar circumstances, whose relationships were actively suppressed under Britain’s sodomy laws well into the twentieth century. The women lived a quiet, cerebral life at Plas Newydd. They had enough money to hire household staff, including Mary Carroll, a colourful character from Sarah’s household in Ireland who remained a faithful servant and friend for the rest of her life.
This left the women free to pursue their interests. A diary entry from the 22nd of September, 1785, captures a typical day: “Up at 7:00, dark morning, all the mountains enveloped in mist, thick rain, a fire in the library, delightfully comfortable. Breakfasted at half past 8:00. From 9:00 till 1:00 writing.
My beloved drawing Pembroke Castle. From 1:00 to 3:00 read to her. After dinner went hastily round the gardens. ” The entry ends: “From 10:00 to 11:00 sat over the fire conversing with my beloved.
A silent, happy day. ” Many other entries describe similar days spent reading, writing, and drawing, showing that the couple were content with their secluded existence. Despite their elopement, the women managed to maintain relationships with their families after an initial period of estrangement. Plas Newydd lay along one of the main routes between Dublin and London, and family members visited frequently.
Both families evidently found the arrangement acceptable as long as Eleanor and Sarah remained in Wales. Over time, the women became famous across Britain. Their Gothic cottage attracted curiosity, and they opened their home to visitors eager to see its unusual architecture. As word of their relationship spread, they began receiving calls from some of the most celebrated figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
These included the poet Sir Walter Scott, the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and the hero of the Napoleonic Wars, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington. Charles Darwin visited with his father, as did the German nobleman and landscape designer Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. It is said that even Queen Charlotte wanted to see the cottage and persuaded King George III to grant the women a pension. Perhaps the most famous visitor was William Wordsworth, who honoured them with his poem “To the Lady E.
B. and the Hon. Miss P. ” The writer Anna Seward also commemorated them in her poem “Llangollen Vale” in 1796, and a pioneering novel by the physician Mary Gordon, published through the patronage of Virginia Woolf in 1936, discussed the Ladies of Llangollen and their relationship.
Their later years were marked by loss. In 1809, their lifelong companion Mary Carroll died, and the couple erected a three-sided monument to serve as a final resting place for the three of them. In their old age, both women took to wearing black riding habits and men’s top hats, which contemporaries viewed as eccentric and outdated, though the clothing was practical for outdoor activity. They refused to have their portraits taken, and the only reliable likenesses we have were made through secret sketches while others distracted them.
They were often short of money, though generous neighbours and benefactors kept them afloat. Anne Lister, the English landowner known for her extensive personal diaries and often dubbed the first modern lesbian, recorded visiting them in 1822 and was impressed by Sarah Ponsonby’s bearing. By that time Eleanor was very old and perhaps bedridden. Eleanor died on the 2nd of June, 1829, in her ninetieth year, of general old age.
Sarah lived on at Plas Newydd for just over two years, passing away on the 9th of December, 1831, at the age of seventy-six. They were buried together in the same plot at Saint Collen’s Church in Llangollen, beside their faithful servant Mary Carroll. Plas Newydd passed into new ownership, with General John Yorke, a British commander and veteran of the Crimean War, residing there for a time. In 1932, the house came into the possession of the Llangollen Urban District Council.
Today it is a museum, preserved both for its unusual design and for the story of the two women who lived there for more than half a century.