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The ladies of Llangollen : desire, indeterminacy, and the legacies of criticism /

"This book explores the lives and afterlives of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement rendered them pivotal figures in the history of female same-sex desire. Butler and Ponsonby's shared life--written, performed, and enacted in the everyday--embodied a form of q...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Brideoake, Fiona, 1977- (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Lewisburg : Lanham, Maryland : Bucknell University Press ; Copublished by the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., [2017]
Series:Transits (Bucknell University)
Subjects:
Butler, Eleanor, > Lady, > 1739-1829.
Ponsonby, Sarah, > 1755-1831.
Butler, Eleanor, > Lady, > 1739-1829 > Influence.
Ponsonby, Sarah, > 1755-1831 > Influence.
Llangollen (Wales) > Biography.
Couples > Wales > Llangollen > Biography.
Female friendship > Wales > Llangollen > History.
Upper class women > Ireland > Kilkenny (County) > Biography.
Female friendship in literature.
Lesbianism in literature.
Couples.
Female friendship.
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Upper class women.
Ireland > Kilkenny (County)
Wales > Llangollen.
Biography.
History.
Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: Casting Butler and Ponsonby : before "the ladies of Llangollen"
  • "Sketched by many hands" : narrating Butler and Ponsonby
  • Engendering the ladies : romantic friendship, gender difference and queer critical practice
  • The great success story : Butler and Ponsonby and the romantic friendship model
  • Gender trouble : Butler and Ponsonby and the masculine/feminine dyad
  • "Our matchless Mary" : Mary Caryll's place at Plas Newydd
  • Butler and Ponsonby and the new queer history
  • Becoming the ladies of Llangollen
  • "Keep yourself in your own persons, where you are" : Butler and Ponsonby's transformation of Plas Newydd
  • "Two fugitive ladies" : on the road with Butler and Ponsonby
  • Cultivating identity
  • Something more tender still than friendship?
  • "Liking one's own sex in a criminal way" : suspicions of sapphism
  • "The saloon of the Minervas" : Butler and Ponsonby's private library
  • "The spirit of blue-stockingism" : were the ladies of Llangollen "blue"?
  • A bluestocking genealogy
  • The ladies of Llangollen and the canonical Bluestockings
  • Were Butler and Ponsonby blue?
  • "Love, above the reach of time" : Butler and Ponsonby and the performance of romanticism
  • The romantics do the ladies
  • Sir Walter Scott's "great romance"
  • The "coy scene" of Sapphic sociability : Anna Seward's Llangollen vale
  • Matching honora : Seward's celebration of Butler and Ponsonby
  • Depth and domesticity : William Wordsworth on Butler and Ponsonby
  • "Doing the ladies" : the Llangollen ideals of Lord Byron and Anne Lister
  • "The future arrives late" : Butler and Ponsonby and their "spiritual descendents," 1928-37
  • "Deeds, not words" : the fight for women's suffrage
  • Butler and Ponsonby and the future that is "to be"
  • Pursuing Butler and Ponsonby : Gordon's Chase of the wild goose
  • "The future arrives late" : ghosting the ladies of Llangollen
  • Afterword.