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A tender and imaginative retelling of the adventures of two of history's most compelling women In 1778 Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left County Kilkenny for Wales to live together as a married couple. Both well born, highly educated Irish women, the Ladies of Llangollen, as they came to be known, defied all eighteenth-century social convention and spent half a century together in a loving relationship. Removed from the intrusive gaze of the world, the fictional Eleanor and Sarah retreat to their shared home to study literature and language and enjoy their solitude. In an imagined account, Doris Grumbach brings this gripping chronicle to new audiences. With a keen sense of the rhythms and routines of longtime partnership, Grumbach breathes vivid life into this fascinating story of a passion both shocking and steadfast.… (more)
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I've been reading Doris Grumbach's books for well over twenty years now, but up until now only her non-fiction - memoirs and essays - her thoughts on life, ageing and death are fascinating. Her two memoirs, COMING INTO THE END ZONE and EXTRA INNINGS, are particular
And now there's this book, a novel based on real historical characters. Lady Eleanor Butler and the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby, two 'well-born' Irish gentlewomen who fall in love. So yes, it's that kind of a story, but it is, unquestionably, a love story. Butler is sixteen years older than Sarah, and definitely the 'strong' one of the couple. Grumbach, who has done her research on this rather famous couple, the "Ladies of Llangollen." Defying societal and religious mores, the couple 'elopes,' wandering for nearly a year, before settling down at their "New Place" farm in rural Wales where they became famous for their unusual and sequestered life, and came to entertain some of the important people of their time - William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and others. They remained together for nearly fifty years, making their own rules and living their own quiet lives.
As Eleanor put it, "We'll live together as married persons do. We'll live and love as they do. Love has no sex, my dearest ... You belong to me. I am yours."
Book lovers, and collectors, a favorite novel for both was Rousseau's LA NOUVELLE HELOISE. Eleanor could relate, and explained it thusly -
"We must understand the story in two ways. First, that true love, like Julie's for Saint-Preur, like Wolmer's for Julie, and Claire's for Saint-Preur, like Heloise's for Abelard ... like ours, endures over all obstacles placed in its way by customs and rules. And then that society's views of true love are stiflingly narrow, and always in terms of marriage ..."
What the two of them had, Eleanor declared, was "natural love." Whatever the two women had, it was a devoted and lasting relationship and Grumbach breathes life back into this odd pair these hundreds of years later.
THE LADIES, first published in 1984, was considered, I believe, a kind of groundbreaking novel of lesbian literature. It is also a beautifully-written story - of two people who defied convention and made a life for themselves. I enjoyed it. Highly recommended.