Clodagh Finn: The Irish women who paved the way for the ‘first modern lesbian’

Writers, illustrators, dukes, even Charles Darwin called on the Irish ladies who dressed like men who fled their homes and families in Ireland to live together in peace in Wales, writes Clodagh Finn.

The Ladies of Llangollen simply wanted to be left alone to correspond with friends, enjoy their well-stocked library, their rambling gardens, and their mutual interest in the arts.

Fans of Gentleman Jack, the BBC series based on industrialist’s Anne Lister’s diaries — “the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history” as Emma Donoghue memorably called them — will be thrilled to hear that the second series has just wrapped.

I certainly am, not least because I’m curious to see if the next instalment of this slick period drama will mention the real-life visit by Anne Lister to two Irish women who scandalised society when they eloped to Wales in 1778 to devote themselves to “romantic friendship” in “delicious seclusion”, as one account has it. 

Eleanor Butler — daughter of the Earl of Ormond of Kilkenny Castle — and Sarah Ponsonby were both disowned by their respective families after a second attempt to flee Ireland was successful, though they were celebrated in their adopted home, Llangollen in north Wales.

Their “heavily ornamented, artfully contrived” gothic cottage, as William Wordsworth described it, became a site of pilgrimage for the curious and the fashionable. Writers, illustrators, dukes, even Charles Darwin and, as we shall see, Gentleman Jack called on the ladies who dressed like men with their powdered hair, well-starched neckcloths, and top hats.

Yet, their intense and loving same-sex relationship was accepted, even fêted. In a sonnet written to them during a visit, Wordsworth wrote: 

Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb/Ev’n on this earth, above the reach of time.”

They came to mind this week following news that filming has finished on the second series of Gentleman Jack. 

Sally Wainwright’s drama, which charts the life (and loves) of Alice Lister, the so-called 'first modern lesbian', is exceptional. It opens a peephole into a history that is poorly documented and, more notably, has put a same-sex romantic storyline at the heart of primetime viewing, gaining more than 6m viewers in the process.

The action is set in 1832 as Anne Lister (Suranne Jones) prepares to live with her ‘wife’ (they had a church blessing) Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle) at her home in Shibden Hall in West Yorkshire. 

I doubt the series will mention her real-life visit to Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby in Wales 10 years earlier, but there is good reason to suggest that Anne Lister plucked up the courage to go against the accepted grain following a visit to the aristocratic Irish women who were living proof that two women could live happily together.

In June 1822, Anne Lister travelled to Wales to visit the Ladies of Llangollen, as they were known. 

“Lady Eleanor (about 80) has the remains of beauty. Miss Ponsonby (10 or 12 years younger) was a very fine woman,” she wrote in her diary.

I am interested about these 2 ladies very much. There is a something in their story and in all I have heard about them here that, added to other circumstances makes a deep impression…”

Later, one of Anne’s former lovers — there were many, as she detailed in code in her four-million-word diary — asked her if she thought the women were more than just devoted friends, a question that many pruriently asked.

Anne responded: “I cannot help thinking that surely it was not platonic. Heaven forgive me, but I look within myself & doubt. I feel the infirmity of our nature & hesitate to pronounce such attachments uncemented by something more tender still than friendship.”

Interestingly, many decades later, the intimate nature of their relationship was roundly denied in their native Kilkenny. 

As research consultant Dr Eemer Eivers recalls: “I was an OPW tour guide in Eleanor’s family home (Kilkenny Castle) in the late 80s. 

Any tourist asking about the famous lesbian couple was quickly told they were just friends. Hopefully, things have changed. Theirs is a great story.”

That certainly has changed, as the women feature prominently in Kilkenny Castle’s online list of the formidable characters who have shaped it over the last 800 years.

Their story has been told in books, documentaries, and magazines too, although they are still much better known in Wales than they are at home. 

There, people recall them and their faithful friend and housekeeper Mary Carryl from Old Ross, Wexford, who stayed with them all of her life. All three are buried together in a gothic-style monument built in 1810 at St Collen’s churchyard in Llangollen.

A local historical society, Hanes Llangollen History, restored it in time to mark its 200th anniversary in 2010, replacing the eroded memorial plaques to the women.

The ladies themselves, however, did not court attention or publicity. They simply wanted to be left alone to correspond with friends, enjoy their well-stocked library, their rambling gardens, and their mutual interest in the arts.

An excerpt from Eleanor Butler’s diary on September 22, 1785, gives an insight into what she described as a “silent, happy day”: 

Up at Seven. Dark Morning, all the Mountains enveloped in mist. Thick Rain. A fire in the Library, delightfully comfortable, Breakfasted at half past Eight. From nine ’till one writing. My Beloved drawing Pembroke Castle — from one to three read to her — after dinner Went hastily around the gardens. Rain’d without interruption the entire day.” 

It couldn’t contrast more starkly with the racy, coded prose of Anne Lister’s diaries which inspired not only Gentleman Jack, but Emma Donoghue’s first play, 1993's  I Know My Own Heart.

Suranne Jones as Anne Lister, Gemma Jones as Aunt Anne Lister, Gemma Whelan as Marian Lister, Timothy West as Jeremy Lister in 'Gentleman Jack'. Picture: BBC/Lookout Point/Jay Brooks

The best-selling author said she admired Anne Lister because she looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there with unflinching precision.

In October 1820, Lister herself wrote: “I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.”

We have been slow, however, to write those stories, as the British Museum noted in a piece describing the provenance of a pair of 18th-century porcelain chocolate cups once owned by Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby.

It reads: “What is extraordinary [about the cups] are the two women who once owned them. Lives and stories of same-sex love and desire like the Ladies of Llangollen can easily go unrecorded in museums, slip out of history and gradually be forgotten, contributing to the false and misleading impression that they never existed before the late 20th century.”

Closer to home, EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, is helping to fill in the missing pieces with its exhibition, Out in the World: Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Diaspora, which features stories from the 1800s to the present, detailing experiences from England to India and Chile.

“Out In The World is a unique vantage point you won’t get anywhere else,” CEO and museum director Patrick Greene said.

“This exhibition is a remarkable opportunity to learn about a past which hasn’t been publicly acknowledged or recognised in mainstream Irish exhibitions or history.

It’s a chance to understand Ireland and its influence around the world through our LGBTQ+ emigrants.”

Can we hope that the “great unrecorded history”, as E M Forster once described the history of the LGBTQ+ community, is finally being told?