The historiography of the so-called ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, has long been preoccupied with determining the exact nature their close relationship. While in 1986, their biographer Elizabeth Mavor called the suggestion of an explicitly sexual relationship between the women ‘a bluntish instrument’ with which to discuss their retirement at Plas Newydd, many have hailed Butler and Ponsonby as a paradigm of ‘trans-historical Lesbian identity’.[1] However, more recent scholarship examining the women has sought to transcend both the debates of consummated ‘genital sexuality’ versus ‘romantic friendship’, and the presentation of Butler and Ponsonby as an ‘indissoluble dyad’.[2] As the poet Anna Seward herself noted in a 1795 letter to her cousin Mary Powys, though ‘devoted to each other’ Butler and Ponsonby’s ‘expanded hearts [had] yet room for other warm attachments’, attachments that constituted a broad social network that included local landowners and members of the gentry, visiting tourists, the villagers of Llangollen, and Seward herself, who visited the women four times throughout their acquaintance.[3]
In her 2005 article, ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community’, Fiona Brideoake complains that the focus on the intensity of Butler and Ponsonby’s relationship negates the ‘persistent presence of Mary Caryll’, Butler and Ponsonby’s loyal housekeeper, who had followed them from Ireland after their initial elopement in 1788, and stayed with them until her death in 1809.[4] W. T. Simpson’s Some Account of Llangollen and Its Vicinity, published in 1827 and dedicated to Butler and Ponsonby, echoes this assertion as to the significance of Caryll, providing a description of her tomb, located in the graveyard of Butler and Ponsonby’s local church.[5] Describing a ‘triangular gothic column of freestone, surrounded by a light iron railing’, Simpson records the tomb’s inscription, which eulogized Caryll as ‘Patient, industrious, faithful, gen’rous, kind, / Her conduct left the proudest far behind; / Her virtues dignified her humble birth, / And raised her mind beyond this sordid earth’.[6]
From its evocative triangular façade, to its laudatory and melancholic inscription, Caryll’s tomb is material testament to her importance at Plas Newydd, as well as Butler and Ponsonby’s deeply felt bereavement following her death, as evidenced by the use of standard mourning rhetoric in referring to 1809, the year of her death, as ‘this present Mournful year’. [7] Given that she lived so closely amongst the women, that she took no wages for her work, and that Butler and Ponsonby were both eventually buried alongside her within this tomb, Caryll’s presence fundamentally questions the traditional narrative woven around Butler and Ponsonby’s intimate retirement.[8] Furthermore, Caryll was also implicated in one of the most consistent and wide-reaching social processes enacted within the space of Plas Newydd; that of gift exchange.
On 1 January 1790, Butler and Ponsonby awoke to find ‘by our bed side Petticoats and Pockets, a new year’s gift from our truest Friends’, an appellation which, as Mavor notes, refers to Caryll and their kitchen maid.[9] As Queen Charlotte’s famous gift of a needlework pocketbook to her friend Mary Delany confirms, needlework and small textile-objects such as pockets, purses, and letter cases were commonly exchanged amongst female friends, serving to reinforce materially the affectionate bond between them. A day after receiving Caryll’s gift, Butler’s journal records ‘My Beloved [Ponsonby] making a letter case for Mrs Tighe – White Satin and Gold – Cypher in the Middle’, whilst in 1811, Ponsonby wrote to her friend Mrs Parker, of Sweeney Hall, Oswestry, to thank her for the ‘Work Box’ that had been enriched with a ‘Glorious Sketch of Needles’.[10] Caryll’s present of ‘Petticoats and Pockets’ therefore implicates Plas Newydd’s servants within an culture of gift exchange, usefully expanding the boundaries of social interaction and intimacy experienced between servant and mistress.
Such examples of gift exchange usefully complicate the notion that Butler and Ponsonby were an ‘indissoluble dyad’, instead presenting lives characterised by multifarious and simultaneous affections.[11] Shifting focus beyond the confines of Butler and Ponsonby’s own attachment, a study of their gift-exchange potently demonstrates their cultivation of relationships with a broad array of correspondents, whose exchange of gifts correspondingly created a material, affective, and ideological dialogue between forms of cultural expression. Plas Newydd’s consecration to friendship then, extended far beyond that shared between Butler and Ponsonby themselves.
I’m so excited to be working up some material on Plas Newydd and gift exchange that didn’t make it into the book into an article at the moment (although the above thoughts on Mary Caryll didn’t make it into that either…) Hopefully I will be able to share some more details about it soon.
[1] Mavor (2001), p. xvii. T. Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 93.
[2] F. Brideoake ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community’, Romanticism on the Net, Special Issue: Queer Romanticism, 36-37 (November 2004, February 2005), para 5. For a discussion of the idea of ‘romantic friendship’, see L. Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, (Virginia: Women’s Press, 1981).
[3] Seward (1811), Vol. IV, p. 120.
[4] Brideoake (2005), para 5.
[5] St Collen’s Parish Church, Llangollen.
[6] W. T. Simpson, Some Account of Llangollen and Its Vicinity: Including a Circuit of About Seven Miles, (London, 1827), p. 186.
[7] S. Ponsonby to Mrs. Parker (1811), DD/LL, 7, Letters from Sarah Ponsonby to Mrs. Parker, Sweeney Hall, Oswestry, 1809-16, 1 vol. Denbighshire Record Office and Archive, Ruthin.
[8] Brideoake (2005), para 5.
[9] E. Mavor, ed. A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, 1st edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.1986), p. 31.
[10] Mavor (1986), p. 31. DD/LL, 7, Ponsonby to Parker (1809-16).
[11] See also S. Lanser, ‘Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:2 (Winter, 1998-9), pp. 179-198.
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