Life With The Ladies Of Llangollen by Lady Eleanor Butler; Sarah Ponsonby; Elizabeth Mavor

The 'Ladies of Llangollen', Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, were two upper-class Irish women whose cohabitation shocked and intrigued contemporary society.

Escaping pressure to make conventional marriages, they set up home together in 1780 in a splendid Gothic mansion in Llangollen, North Wales, where distinguished visitors would stopover on the route to Dublin. These included Shelley, Byron, Wellington and Wordsworth, who wrote a sonnet about them. As the two ladies dressed in men’s clothes, they were assumed to be lesbians, though they professed outrage at this suggestion.