Two unusual women

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32703, 4 September 1971, Page 10

Two unusual women

The Ladies Of Llangollen. By Elizabeth Mavor. Michael Joseph. 211 pp. Notes and Index. In her introduction to this biography Elizabeth Mavor thanks her husband for living patiently with “these two charming but exacting friends.” The adjectives she uses indicate well her attitude to the two extraordinary women Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. They also suggest the effect of the book as a whole, for it is one with charm but also with an admirable and obvious foundation of exacting research. The two friends’ attempted elopement from Ireland in 1778 created a furore of- opposition from friends and relations but they finally achieved their ambition and settled in a cottage near the Welsh village of Llangollen. Their life there together for half a century exemplified all the joys of “retirement” and made them objects of adulation in their day, constantly visited by the famous and great. Miss Mavor has chronicled their life with sympathy and perception. She quotes freely from hitherto unpublished material such as- Eleanor Butler’s journals and Sarah Ponsonby’s letters. The carefully selected extracts reveal most movingly their great love for each other. Miss Mavor sub-titles her book “A Study in Romantic Friendship” and in chapter five she discusses such friendship and especially that of her subjects with the stress not on sexual implications but on the genuine and deep feeling evident in all aspects of their life together. Financial problems beset the ladies from the first months of their freedom and Miss Mavor records their income and expenditure in great detail. She details too the constant changes and improvements they made in their cottage, Plas Newydd, and its garden. Such minutiae may become tiresome to the modem reader but this is a very minor fault in a book which tells simply, vividly and accurately the astonishing story of these two unusual women.