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The Ladies of Llangollen
Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism
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2017
Summary
The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of “retirement” turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes “proof” of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life—written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday—to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2017
ISBN-Print
978-1-61148-761-9
ISBN-Online
978-1-61148-762-6
Publisher
University Press Copublishing, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
332
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
CONTENTS No access
ILLUSTRATIONS No access
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No access
CASTING BUTLER AND PONSONBY: Before “the Ladies of Llangollen” No access
CHAPTER 1. “SKETCHED BY MANY HANDS”: Narrating Butler and Ponsonby No access Pages 1 - 18
CHAPTER 2. ENGENDERING THE LADIES: Romantic Friendship, Gender Difference, and Queer Critical Practice No access Pages 19 - 70
CHAPTER 3. BECOMING THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN No access Pages 71 - 98
CHAPTER 4. “KEEP YOURSELF IN YOUR OWN PERSONS, WHERE YOU ARE”: Butler and Ponsonby’s Transformation of Plas Newydd No access Pages 99 - 154
CHAPTER 5. “THE SPIRIT OF BLUE-STOCKINGISM”: Were the Ladies of Llangollen “Blue”? No access Pages 155 - 186
CHAPTER 6. “LOVE, ABOVE THE REACH OF TIME”: Butler and Ponsonby and the Performance of Romanticism No access Pages 187 - 236
CHAPTER 7. “THE FUTURE ARRIVES LATE”: Butler and Ponsonby and Their “Spiritual Descendants,” 1928–1937 No access Pages 237 - 284
