CHAPTER SIX

The Fairer Sex

At Shibden Hall she had them all
The fairer sex fell under her spell
Dapper and bright
She held them tight
Handsome Anne seduced them well
Gentleman Jack
Oh Gentleman Jack
Watch your back you’re under attack
—O’Hooley and Tidow, opening song for HBO’s Gentleman Jack, produced in 2012

Gentleman Jack was the real-life nickname of Anne Lister, one of the most famous queer people of the nineteenth century during and after her life. Out and even married to a woman, Anne ruled her corner of Halifax as a wealthy landowner after she inherited her uncle’s estate Shibden Hall.

In 2017 HBO and BBC One announced that they were developing a TV show about Anne Lister and her exploits, based on the coded diaries she kept throughout her life. The series premiered in 2019.

Gentleman Jack follows Anne as she meets, seduces, and eventually marries her neighbor, the heiress Ann Walker.

Gentleman Jack was an immediate success, and a second season was ordered almost immediately after the premiere episode.

Modern audiences were hungry for representation of the queer people we know existed during the Regency. This representation has appeared in the world of fiction through pioneering works of historical fiction like Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask based on the real life of Anne Damer, sculptor and rumored lesbian, and her love affair with the celebrated actress Eliza Farren, who went on to marry the twelfth Earl of Derby.

Romance novels have also filled the void, with queer characters taking center stage and getting their happy endings in works by authors like Cat Sebastian, KJ Charles, EE Ottoman, and Lily Maxton. In June 2019 Avon Books released their first historical lesbian title, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, which features a heroine studying astronomy much like Caroline Herschel.

The question of identification, self and otherwise, when discussing sexuality historically is a difficult one to be sure, but it shouldn’t stand in the way of considering the queer women of the Regency together and separately.

Some of the women in this chapter left behind written proof of their love for other women. Others remain tantalizingly silent on the subject.

Absence of proof is not itself proof of anything.

The four women profiled in this chapter offer different versions of queer identity in the Regency. While there are shared themes and through-lines in their stories, each one is unique. They remind us that queer identity has never been a monolith.

They also show us that queer people were able to carve out happy and fulfilling lives in nineteenth-century England. Despite sometimes critical and satirizing press, the women in this chapter sought out people who would love and accept them as they were. In doing so, they gave us a historical record that shows there were always people who believe love is love is love.

ANNE DAMER

As the only female sculptor to exhibit at the Royal Academy in the nineteenth century, Anne Seymour Damer was a famous character in her own time. She was also the subject of persistent rumors surrounding the close relationships she enjoyed with women. Unlike other queer figures in the Regency, Anne never took any public action to confirm or deny the rumors. She simply lived her life.

Anne is a bundle of contradictions. In some ways she followed expectations, as with her (unhappy but socially advantageous) marriage. In other ways she confounded her contemporaries, for example by refusing to stay on the traditional path following her husband’s death. Anne is a fascinating example of an aristocratic Regency woman who practiced her art for love and money, facing down public mockery with the support of her friends.

Anne Seymour Damer, née Conway, was born on November 8, 1748, into a world of immense wealth and privilege. Her parents, Henry Seymour Conway, an army officer and politician, and Caroline Bruce, Lady Ailesbury, knew everybody who was anybody in late-eighteenth-century British society. Their marriage was a love match, and Caroline’s second marriage after the death of her much older husband, the Earl of Ailesbury. The couple were popular hosts at their London townhouse in Soho Square and at their country seat, Park Place.

Anne was the couple’s only child (Lady Ailesbury had a daughter from her first marriage). She was doted on and given every advantage by her parents, and by all accounts was a charming and intelligent child. But the Conways were in high demand as emissaries for England, they were frequently abroad, and in the time-honored tradition of all children left behind, Anne received a series of exotic and unusual gifts, including a pet monkey.

When they traveled, the Conways had the perfect guardian for their precocious daughter—their dear friend Horace Walpole.

SPOTLIGHT ON HORACE WALPOLE

Horace Walpole was one of the most colorful, and important, characters of the early-nineteenth-century world. Wealthy, connected, a terrible gossip, and a celebrated author, Walpole—much like his protégée Anne Damer—lived life on his own terms.

Born in 1717 to Robert Walpole, the prime minister of England, and his wife, Catherine, Horace was destined for greatness. He wrote the celebrated Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764. In 1791 he ascended to the peerage as he inherited the title of Earl of Orford.

Despite this impressive lineage, and the attendant pressures to produce an heir, Horace remained unmarried his whole life. He enjoyed extremely close friendships with a number of men, including Anne’s father, Henry Conway, as well as women. Much like Anne, Horace faced rumors surrounding his sexuality his entire life. Also like Anne, he ignored them and continued on just as he pleased.

Horace’s great love was his estate Strawberry Hill, which he turned into a Gothic masterpiece. There he established his own printing press, where he printed his friends’ works.

Horace lived a fascinating life. And he narrated the whole thing through the endless letters he wrote to friends and contemporaries. He left his correspondence to the Berry sisters, and his beloved Strawberry Hill to Anne.

Walpole’s letters read like a Rolodex of the wealthy and powerful of late-eighteenth-century England. As son of the first prime minister, Walpole enjoyed a unique position fusing his roles as an arbiter of taste, highly connected political figure, and patron of the arts into something wholly him.

(BACK TO ANNE DAMER)

Walpole had a reputation for collecting talented young women, and Anne was no exception. He extolled her virtues in the many letters he sent around the world, and encouraged her in her artistic pursuits. It was not needlework or the expected watercolors or evening oil portraits that Anne was interested in creating.

Along with the de rigueur French and Italian, Anne also mastered Latin and Greek. From a very early age she evinced an admiration for the classical world and style. She wanted to join the pantheon of classical artists she most admired: the sculptors.

In all things, Anne was an original. But her career choice—the choice to join the almost exclusively male domain of sculpting—was so unusual that it swiftly created a mythology surrounding her decision.

The story goes that she was walking with her father’s secretary, the soon-to-be-famous historian David Hume, when they ran into a boy in the street carrying a tray with several plaster figures on it. After Anne dismissed the boy’s artistic attempts, Hume asserted that no matter Anne’s many talents, she couldn’t produce anything like the boy had. The legend goes that Anne was so determined to prove Hume wrong that she devoted her life to becoming a sculptor.

Before she could do that, however, even the inimitable Anne had to follow the expected life path of an aristocratic young lady and get married.

There were many candidates for her hand, including at least two dukes. But in 1767 Anne married John Damer, the eldest son of Lord Milton. He was also a rake and a gambling addict. Walpole had his misgivings about the marriage, but he was still intimately involved in the negotiations. His letters indicate that while he knew about Damer’s past, he also knew Anne’s parents were thrilled with the match and he wanted to support them. Society deemed it a good pairing. Anne’s feelings are not recorded, and may not have mattered. The powers that be had spoken, and Anne and John were married.

The truth, of course, was much more complicated. Anne and John were estranged within a year, and spent the rest of their nine-year marriage apart. In the face of this failure, Anne often retreated to Strawberry Hill and the circle of friends surrounding Horace Walpole. There she met the leading thinkers, artists, politicians, and academics of the day.

Seeking refuge from her unhappy marriage, in the early 1770s Anne became fast friends with two of the leading society ladies of her day: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Melbourne.

SPOTLIGHT ON GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

Georgiana is one of those one-name people, like Madonna or Rihanna.

Born in 1757 to John Spencer, later Earl Spencer, and his wife Georgiana, Georgiana the younger enjoyed an idyllic childhood.

That ended with her marriage at seventeen to William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire. The marriage was a deeply unhappy one.

As the Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana was one of the most important social and political hostesses of her day. She threw herself into her duties, and emerged as an arbiter of fashion, to put it mildly. Everything she did and wore was watched, commented on, and often copied by her peers. She used this to support a number of female artists through noted patronage.

Despite her beauty and social success, the Duke of Devonshire had little interest in his young wife. Instead he carried on a passionate affair with Lady Elizabeth Foster, a close friend of Georgiana’s. Rather than fight the situation, Georgiana allowed Lady Elizabeth to live with them, creating one of the most unusual domestic arrangements of the time. This love triangle explains why Georgiana looked outside her marriage for companionship, forming close attachments to a number of female friends and notoriously taking several famous lovers.

Georgiana is often remembered for the intersection of her scandalous personal life and her role as a leader in society and politics. She blended the two by carrying on an affair with Charles Grey, who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834.

While Georgiana and the duke’s marriage was notoriously unhappy, it still produced three daughters who carried on Georgiana’s legacy after her death in 1806. She was so famous that upon her death the Prince of Wales was said to remark, “The best natured and the best bred woman in England is gone.”

(BACK TO ANNE DAMER)

Ever dramatic, Anne immortalized her new friendship with Georgiana and Lady Melbourne in a painting she commissioned from Daniel Gardner in 1775. The women are shown as the three witches from Macbeth, surrounding a cauldron. [Figure 14]

As famous, rich, and celebrated as these women were, each had her own set of personal and public struggles. It’s fascinating to see them banding together as a friend group to face these difficulties. We often think of historical women, especially brilliant ones, as isolated. Anne and her friends chose to be remembered exactly as that: friends.

Their choice to be portrayed as Macbeth’s witches is certainly provocative! Enough that their contemporary Lady Mary Coke wrote about the decision in her diary: “I daresay they think their charms more irresistible than all the magick of the Witches.”¹

Framing the women as witches shows a keen awareness of the gossip surrounding them, their friendship, and their political machinations. All three were devoted members of the Whig party who campaigned vigorously for their preferred candidate Charles Fox in 1784 to much public scorn. This included an array of caricatures poking fun at everything from the fashionable clothing the women wore to campaign, to more serious charges of exchanging sexual favors for votes. Instead of apologizing for their political meddling, the women chose one of the most iconic images of women meddling in the fates of men as their representation.

There are two versions of the portrait, and their differences illuminate a certain truth of history. In the first Georgiana wears a tiara, denoting her higher social status. The portrait is laden with symbolism. Cats climb on Lady Melbourne, while Anne’s dress is decorated with scales of justice, skull and bones, and animals. It’s a careful show of strength, humor, and awareness for a public audience.

The second portrait is far less formal. The three women hold hands, and all wear the same traditional black witch’s hat. Lady Melbourne probably commissioned the second version, as it hung at her daughter’s country estate Panshanger. It is a much more personal record of the friendship the women shared, highlighting a certain version of history, the one the women have chosen for themselves.

As Macbeth’s witches, Anne and her friends flipped the script, becoming the ones with the real power, scheming behind the scenes to achieve their desired ends. Of course, this fantasy only lasted so long. While Anne busied herself with her friends and family, her unhappy marriage continued to deteriorate. In 1776 her husband killed himself after a night of bad luck at the gambling tables.

Anne was suddenly a widow. And she had an enormous amount of debt to pay off. Her husband had racked up over £70,000 in gambling debt. Lord Milton was no help; distraught and furious at his son’s death, he blamed Anne and demanded she pay the debts herself.

In the face of tragedy and hardship, Anne showed her true strength of character. She sold her jewels and went to live with her half sister, trying to save money anywhere she could.

After paying back the debts, Anne was left to consider a very different life than she had been living, financially at least. She spent some time traveling with her aunt, to Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France. Finally she settled back in London, setting up a studio and turning back to her childhood dream of becoming a sculptor.

Walpole wrote to a friend that he had never seen Anne so happy. But amid this journey to find herself, for the first time Anne also faced public rumors about her extremely close and passionate friendships with women.

In 1777 a couplet poem written by William Coombe appeared: The First of April; Or, The Triumphs of Folly. It was not the last, or the most explicit, but it was the first public accusation of indifference at her husband’s death, and of finding comfort with her fellow widows.

The twin truths of Anne’s life seem inextricably linked: her pursuit of a traditionally male career and her passionate female friendships, which she refused to displace with a second marriage.

As her fame as a sculptor grew, the rumors continued. In 1789 the two were connected forever in the historical record with the appearance of a satirical print titled The Damerian Apollo. [Figure 15] In the image, Anne is at work. She is seated, with her mallet raised above her head. Her chisel penetrates the buttocks of the statue of Apollo in front of her. Apollo gestures toward another statue in front of him, in which a man and woman embrace. They stand on a pedestal that says STUDIES FROM NATURE.

The meaning is clear. There is a natural order to things, a natural way of relationships. Man and woman go together.

The Damerian Apollo was put on display at William Holland’s exhibition room in Oxford Street for all to come and see. This was a public and embarrassing calling-out.

We don’t have an existing record of Anne’s reaction to this particular offensive print. But we do have letters between Anne and her friend Edward Jerningham showing that Anne was aware of rumors being printed in the press, asking Jerningham to keep an eye out, and finally telling him she doesn’t wish him to speak to an editor about printing the rumors. It is particularly striking to see Anne refuse the help of her friends in combating these stories.

Anne refused to go the “natural” way. She held stubbornly to her independence, turning down multiple marriage proposals. Free of one unhappy marriage, she was loath to enter another.

Seventeen eighty-nine was also the year that Horace Walpole introduced Anne to Mary Berry, another one of his protégées and the woman with whom Anne would spend the rest of her life in an emotionally passionate relationship.²

Mary Berry and her sister Agnes had met Walpole a year earlier, and quickly charmed him. Much as with Anne, Walpole encouraged the sisters in their writing and art, and let them live in Little Strawberry Hill, a house on his estate.

Anne and Mary became fast friends. But this friendship was different, both publicly and privately, than her past dalliances.

Anne and Mary have sometimes been considered in the tradition of “romantic friendship” or a Boston marriage. The term refers to the cohabitation of two women, and has traditionally referred to a chaste relationship. It’s usually associated with Henry James’s novel The Bostonians (1886), which tells the story of two women living together and struggling with their feelings for one another.

It is hard not to editorialize here. The passion in Anne and Mary’s letters is clear. They were each other’s confidantes and confessors. They helped each other through heartache and family drama. They were partners in art, working together on Mary’s play Fashionable Friends. Contemporaries remarked on their devotion to one another. Adhering to the sentimental tradition of the day, Anne gave Mary a portrait of herself by Richard Cosway. Cosway also captured Anne and Mary in an unguarded moment at Strawberry Hill, the sketch of which jumps out at a modern viewer for the connection between the two women, despite their lack of physical closeness in the image. [Figure 16] Instead Anne and Mary are shown sitting across a table from one another, the affection between them clear on their respective faces.

Anne and Mary’s mutual friend, the playwright Joanna Baillie, wrote extensively to both women. Amid all the gossip and comments on Mary’s latest play, there is a clear pattern. In every letter, Joanna asks after Anne or Mary. The two women are inextricably linked in her mind. They are a pair, a partnership.

After Walpole’s death in 1797, the women lived together at Strawberry Hill. They devoted themselves to honoring Walpole’s memory by giving tours of the house to curious visitors, and they amused themselves and their friends by putting up amateur theatricals in the theater.

They also traveled together, which was actually more socially acceptable than either of them traveling alone. In 1802 they went to Paris, where they were granted an audience with Napoleon as well as his wife, Josephine, and Napoleon’s mother. This paved the way for a later visit during the Hundred Days in 1815 when Anne presented Napoleon with a marble bust of Charles Fox and he gave her a bejeweled snuffbox.

Anne’s career continued to flourish. Between 1784 and 1818 she exhibited thirty-two works as an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy. She traveled to Italy frequently and studied with masters there, ever on a quest to perfect her art.

Anne died in 1828. She was buried with the ashes of her dog and her sculptor’s tools. She left behind hundreds of works of art, letters, journals, and even a novel, but no conclusive record of her feelings toward friends like Mary Berry, Lady Melbourne, and Eliza Farren.

It is impossible to definitively identify Anne Damer as a lesbian, at least with the currently available sources. But the fact that she was identified as such during her lifetime, even if it was maliciously intended, means that she is an intrinsic part of the conversation on queer identity in Regency England.

It is undeniable that Anne thrived, despite the rumors surrounding her sexuality. She enjoyed a wide circle of friends and received critical accolades for her art. She also refused to adhere to the societal norms of the day, in more ways than one. She left behind a legacy of perseverance in staying true to one’s own self.

ANNE LISTER

In some ways, Anne Lister is worlds away from Anne Damer. With Damer, all we can do is read between the lines, search for clues, and make our conclusions.

Anne Lister is a nineteenth-century historian’s dream. It can be terribly frustrating to have theories and hunches but no way to verify them. Anne solved this problem by leaving behind journals documenting the quotidian of her daily and emotional life from the age of sixteen. The fact that many of these thoughts were those of lust and love for other women makes the journal all the more fascinating and important.

Aware of the explosive nature of what she was writing, Anne wrote the journals in a code she called crypthand, a mix of algebra and the Greek alphabet. The first journals are just a few sheets of loose-leaf paper, but as Anne began to take her journaling more seriously she started to use school exercise books and finally hard-backed notebooks. There are sixty-six hundred pages of material and over four million words.

While Anne was clearly aware of the transgressive nature of her sexuality, she did nothing to hide her truth. In fact she dressed all in black, frequently in men’s clothing, and she earned the nickname Gentleman Jack from the local Halifax community, indicating that there was something distinctly masculine about Anne’s appearance and presentation. She lived openly with and went through church marriage rituals with a woman, her neighbor Ann Walker—a courtship and marriage chronicled in the aforementioned television show Gentleman Jack.

Anne was as openly queer as one could possibly be in Regency England. She’s usually discussed as an anomaly. But what is clear from Anne’s journals is that there were any number of ready and willing female partners just within her local community in Halifax, and even more when she traveled abroad.

Born on April 3, 1791, to Jeremy Lister, a captain in the American War for Independence, and Rebecca Battle, Anne was one of six children. Three of her brothers died in infancy, while her brother Samuel died in 1813 in a boating accident. She had a younger sister, Marian.

The death of her brother meant that Anne would inherit Shibden Hall, her uncle James’s estate. She moved there in 1815 with her sister, happy to escape her parents’ house.

Anne’s aunt and uncle were much more permissive than her parents, and Anne quickly gained a reputation in Halifax for her masculine behavior and appearance.

Unlike Anne Damer or the Ladies of Llangollen, there is no doubt that Anne Lister unequivocally identified as a lover of women and enjoyed physical relationships with a number of them. In 1821 Anne wrote, “I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.”³ She referred to this preference as her “oddity.”

Anne was a wealthy and independent woman, and she lived as such. She was the first woman to be elected to the committee of the Halifax branch of the Literary and Philosophical Society. On her land she developed coal mining, from which future generations would benefit. (This change in industry was a focus of Gentleman Jack, positioning Anne as particularly progressive and industrious in her mining attempts.) She traveled, and was the first woman to ascend Mount Perdu in the Pyrenees. In 1838 she became the first person to ascend Mount Vignemale.

Even with such an adventurous nature, Anne craved a respectable relationship. In 1823 she wrote in her journal, “But I mean to amend at five & thirty & retire with credit. I shall have a good fling before then. Four years. And in the meantime I shall make my avenae communes, my wild oats common. I shall domiciliate then.”⁴

And a “good fling” she had. Before she settled down, Anne enjoyed a number of tumultuous and passionate relationships both local and international. The great love of her life was Mariana Lawton. They were introduced by another of Anne’s lovers, Isabella Norcliffe. Isabella desperately wanted to settle down with Anne, but Anne did not approve of her drinking, and she rejected Isabella in favor of her friend Mariana. Isabella never got over Anne’s rejection and remained single her whole life.

Mariana, on the other hand, married Charles Lawton soon after meeting Anne and starting a relationship with her. Anne never fully got over this betrayal, but the pair also continued their relationship long after the marriage, and their correspondence even longer than that.

After years of affairs, Anne settled down in 1834 with a neighboring heiress, Ann Walker.

Ann was an interesting choice for many reasons. Unlike the passionate and turbulent love affairs of her youth, Anne’s relationship with Ann was much more domestic and traditional. Ann was known as a quiet, gently bred young woman. Choosing Ann shows just how much Anne cared about being socially accepted and living as respectable a life as possible. Their union made sense in financial and geographic terms. The two went through various marriage rituals and formally joined their business interests, writing each other into their respective wills.

In 1840 they traveled through Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland to reach Russia. There Anne caught a fever and died at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. Ann brought her body back to Halifax, where she was buried in the parish church.

SARAH PONSONBY AND ELEANOR BUTLER: THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

Unlike Anne Damer and Anne Lister and their various partners, the Ladies of Llangollen cannot be considered separately. The two are tied together by a single, life-changing choice. Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, known collectively as the Ladies of Llangollen, eloped in 1778 and lived together for the rest of their lives, becoming figures of great interest to their contemporaries.

Despite their unconventional living arrangement, the Ladies maintained that their relationship was chaste. They exist on a spectrum somewhere between Anne Damer and Anne Lister, and provide a third example of queer identity in Regency England.

Eleanor Charlotte Butler was born in Cambrai, France, in 1739 to prominent Irishman Walter Butler and Eleanor de Montmorency Morres. Eleanor was the third daughter and quickly followed by a brother, John, born a year later. She spent most of her childhood in France, educated at the English Benedictine House in Cambrai.

She returned to Kilkenny in 1768, to see her brother convert to Anglicanism and marry Lady Anne Wandesford. Her sisters had already married, leaving Eleanor as the sole single Butler sibling.

Meanwhile… Sarah Ponsonby was born in 1755 to Chambre Ponsonby and his second wife, Louisa Lyons. Her mother died when she was three and her father soon after, leaving Sarah an orphan. She was sent by her widowed stepmother to live with her cousin Lady Betty Fownes and her husband, who soon sent Sarah off to boarding school in Kilkenny.

Where thirteen-year-old Sarah Ponsonby met twenty-nine-year-old Eleanor Butler.

We don’t know how they met, or much at all about their early interactions. And while that age gap might raise modern eyebrows, it was seemingly uninteresting enough for none of their contemporaries to comment on it.

Their biographer Elizabeth Mavor (who insists the Ladies’ relationship was emotionally intense but physically chaste) notes the similarity between the Ladies’ later plans and a 1762 account by Sarah Scott of philanthropic female retirement, A Description of Millenium Hall. But we have no proof the Ladies knew about Scott’s work. We have no idea where they found inspiration for their unprecedented choice to abandon their expected futures for the complete unknown, together.

What we do know is that in 1773, Sarah Ponsonby left school to live with her cousin Lady Fownes and her husband, Sir William, and soon after began writing to family friends that Sir William had made inappropriate sexual advances toward her and seemed to have designs on marrying her after his wife’s anticipated death.

Meanwhile, Eleanor’s relationship with her mother had deteriorated as she discovered her mother’s plans to send her to a convent.

Eleanor and Sarah shared secret letters detailing their unhappy future prospects and began forming a plan to run away together and set up a house away from their families.

On March 30, 1778, the pair escaped from their respective homes wearing men’s clothing and carrying pistols. They met up and traveled to Waterford together, to catch a packet boat to Wales. The twosome were caught before they could leave, and forcibly separated by their families.

The softhearted Lady Betty allowed Eleanor and Sarah a final goodbye, and during the meeting the pair formulated another plan for escape. Eleanor ran away again, straight to Sarah’s, where Sarah’s faithful servant Mary Caryll helped hide Eleanor in a cupboard.

Despite pressure from family and friends, Sarah maintained that she meant to “live and die with Miss Butler.”⁵ Eleanor’s family was furious, and ten days of negotiations between them commenced, until finally, and without any explanation, Eleanor’s father arranged for the women to leave together.

On May 4, 1778, the Ladies set out together for Wales. They remained in Waterford for four days, waiting for the vagaries of maritime travel to sort out, and on May 9, 1778, the Ladies left Ireland, never to return.

Their early travels were recorded by Sarah in her journal titled An Account of a Journey in Wales, Perform’d in May 1778 by Two Fugitive Ladies, And Dedicated to Her most tenderly Beloved Companion By The Author. The journal notes the Ladies’ first visit to Llangollen on May 25, 1778. Sarah describes it as a “pretty village on the river Dee” but indicates no other opinions on the place that would become their home and with which they would become indelibly linked.

The Ladies meant to settle in England, but the successive and unexpected deaths of Sir William and Lady Betty threw into sharp relief the reality of the Ladies’ financial situation. They had a £200 annuity from Eleanor’s father and a meager £80 from Lady Betty’s daughter Sarah Tighe, who had a fondness for the Ladies.

It seems the Ladies originally settled in Llangollen in 1779, before finally renting the two-story cottage that they christened Plas Newydd, Welsh for “new hall.”

Luckily for the Ladies, the local gentry accepted them despite their unconventional living arrangement. This was thanks in large part to Anne Hill-Trevor, Lady Dungannon, a friend of Lady Betty’s, whose embrace of the Ladies paved the way for the rest of the local gentry to befriend them.

By 1789 Sarah and Eleanor’s letters are full of descriptions of busy social calendars. And despite many reports to the contrary, they maintained a line of communication with many family members, some of whom offered financial assistance, while others even visited. They had a wide circle of local friends, and socialized with many important thinkers, writers, and politicians of their time.

The Ladies’ beloved and faithful servant Mary Caryll died in 1809. Eleanor died in 1829, and Sarah followed in 1831. The three are buried together at St. Collen’s Church in Llangollen.

THE LADIES’ AFTERLIFE

The Ladies have long been embraced as queer icons. The unusual nature of their lives means that they were much discussed during and after their lifetimes.

The Ladies were acutely aware of the importance of their public reputation. They knew public acceptance was key to their families financially supporting them in their unconventional arrangement. And to be publicly accepted, the Ladies had to maintain that their association was friendship, rather than a sexual relationship.

Unlike Anne Damer and Anne Lister, the Ladies considered legal action when faced with printed accusations of lesbianism. They even consulted a lawyer. Their very existence depended on strict control of their public image.

Perhaps this is one reason the Ladies were so resistant to having their portrait made. Only one image drawn from life exists of the Ladies. It is a watercolor that Mary Parker, later Lady Leighton, made on a visit with her mother. This image is the basis for the Ladies’ future visual legacy. [Figure 17]

Like Anne Lister, the Ladies developed their own distinct style. They both wore their hair cropped short and favored black riding habits and top hats when out and about. This choice to dress as they pleased was another way to assert their individuality.

They were visited by writers like Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. The Ladies encouraged their visitors to write poems inspired by their visits. These poems are fascinating additions to the debate about how the Ladies were received by their contemporaries. The poems and other writings produced by visitors to Llangollen played an important role in the mythologizing of the Ladies and their relationship.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POEM TO THE LADY E. B. AND HON. MISS P. COMPOSED IN THE GROUNDS OF PLAS NEWYDD, NEAR LLANGOLLEN, 1824

A stream, to mingle with your favorite Dee,

Along the Vale of Meditation flows;

In Nature’s face the expression of repose;

Or haply there some pious hermit chose

To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;

To whom the wild, sequestered region owes,

At this late day, its sanctifying name,

Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian Tongue,

In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let this spot

Be named, where, faithful to a low-roofed cot,

On Deva’s banks ye have abode so long;

Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,

Even on this earth, above the reach of time!

In his flattering poem, Wordsworth is careful to situate the Ladies in their appropriate place of honor, both historically and geographically. He also softens the truth of their cohabitation, ascribing their unusual choice to the love of sisters.

The Ladies and questions surrounding their sexuality were treated differently than were contemporary assumed lesbians, like Anne Damer. While Damer was the subject of a number of satirical images, most notably The Damerian Apollo, the Ladies arranged for and encouraged their many illustrious visitors to write poetry inspired by their visits to Plas Newydd. The Ladies were careful to influence how they were perceived by cultivating friendships and encouraging prestigious visitors, keeping them in control of their public narrative in a fascinating, and important, way.

WERE THE LADIES LESBIANS?

Ever since the Ladies’ elopement, there has been debate about the sexual nature of their relationship, one that has continued throughout years of scholarship.

The Ladies have long been considered in the tradition of “romantic friendship.” This is due in large part to Elizabeth Mavor’s seminal work The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (1971). Mavor cites Sarah Tighe’s contemporary letter from immediately after the Ladies’ first attempt at elopement: “The runaways are caught and we shall soon see our amiable friend [Ponsonby] again whose conduct, although has an appearance of imprudence, is I am sure void of serious impropriety. There were no gentlemen involved, nor does it appear more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.”

Mavor joins Lillian Faderman in the tradition of academics who insist that these female friendships were socially acceptable and almost certainly physically chaste.

There is another, very different school of thought that situates the Ladies firmly in the middle of the gay and lesbian liberation movement. Jeanette H. Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956) included the Ladies in a chapter on women of whom “persistent rumor or conjectural evidence strongly suggests variance.”

What is clear is that the Ladies made unconventional choices that were accepted, if sometimes questioned, by their contemporaries.

Rather than declare them lesbians or any other sexual identity, queer seems to fit the Ladies best. As David Halperin notes, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” The Ladies certainly fit within that tradition. They courted respectability while also refusing to conform to the expected.

CONCLUSION

The presence of so many queer women in the Regency world gives us a hint at the answer to the age-old question of why the Regency continues to fascinate and delight so many generations.

We think of the Regency as strictly governed by a set of social rules, and queer women would seem to fall outside those carefully constructed boundaries. However, Anne Damer, Anne Lister, the Ladies of Llangollen, and the many women they loved tell us otherwise. They show us that not only did queer people exist in the Regency, but they found communities that accepted them and made full, happy lives for themselves.

The queer women in this chapter did not exist in isolation. Anne Lister visited the Ladies at Plas Newydd, admiring their “rustic library”⁶ and admitting, “I am interested about these two ladies very much.”⁷ The Ladies were also connected to Anne Damer through their mutual friend Anna Seward, a poet of renown who enjoyed her own close relationships with women.

Indeed, the same names show up again and again in studies of lesbianism in the nineteenth century, indicating once again that even if the network was unofficial it very much existed, tying the queer women of the nineteenth century to one another through bonds of friendship and love.

The Regency was a period of immense change politically, artistically, and culturally. Amid that upheaval, queer people not only existed but thrived. Their stories, in all their complicated, messy glory, can teach us so much. They help us better understand the complicated line women walked between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior, and how, if they were determined enough, they could carve out a life on their own terms, loving and living as they chose.

CHAPTER SIX

The Fairer Sex

ANNE DAMER

SPOTLIGHT ON HORACE WALPOLE

(BACK TO ANNE DAMER)

SPOTLIGHT ON GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

(BACK TO ANNE DAMER)

ANNE LISTER

SARAH PONSONBY AND ELEANOR BUTLER: THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN

THE LADIES’ AFTERLIFE

WERE THE LADIES LESBIANS?

CONCLUSION

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