Outside the Love of Men: The Ladies of Llangollen, Anna Seward and Female Friendship

In 1778 the Irish spinsters Lady Eleonor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby eloped to live together in Llangollen Vale, in North Wales. On the one hand, their choice provoked the dismay of their aristocratic families; on the other hand, it elicited the curiosity of many writers and intellectuals of the time. Among them was Anna Seward, who went to meet the “Ladies of Llangollen” in their secluded renovated Gothic Villa in 1795. She was so struck by their amiable attitudes and charismatic personalities that she started corresponding with them regularly and wrote the long poem "Llangollen Vale" (1796) to celebrate the reality and myth of Romantic friendship they incarnated. After introducing the three protagonists in the context of both Romantic-period responses to the Ladies’ friendship and twentieth-century as well as more recent theories of same-sex Romantic relationships, the essay will focus on "Llangollen Vale". Here, by representing the protagonists as genii loci and epic heroines, Seward turns them into exemplars of an alternative narrative of development to larger national narratives of improvement and progress.