A Very Queer Romance
AS NORTH WALES GEARS UP FOR ITS ANNUAL PRIDE EVENT, NAT NEWMAN INTRODUCES THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN THE COOLEST LADY LOVERS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF
On a stormy night in 1778, Lady Eleanor Butler put on men’s clothes, climbed out the window of her aristocratic home at Kilkenny Castle, and made her way to Woodstock, 12 miles away. She was riding a horse for the first time in her life. Her object? Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who at the same was climbing out of her own window, in men’s clothing, with her dog Frisk and a loaded pistol. Meet the A Very Queer Romance, the coolest lady-lovers you’ve never heard of.
Romantic friends: the A Very Queer Romance
PHOTOS WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON
Lady Eleanor Butler was born in 1739 into one of the most prestigious families in Ireland. She enjoyed a good education and was by all accounts a bit of an eccentric bookworm. She had received several proposals of marriage but never gave away her hand. A potential suitor once said that she was “a woman that no man will conquer”. Instead she was to be conquered by the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby.
Sarah was also from a good family but, orphaned at a young age, she was sent oł to boarding school. She was only 13 when she met Eleanor at the school in Kilkenny, but the two became firm friends and spent the next 10 years in close communication. They were both extremely intelligent, and they shared a love of education, poetry and refinement of the mind. They weren’t interested in fashion and parties and the general pursuits of the aristocracy. They just wanted to be leŸ alone.