The Ladies of Llangollen were a pair of Irish heiresses, with a twenty year age-gap, who set up house together in a Welsh valley. There, they lived a quiet and domestic life, slowly improving their home and gardens, keeping to themselves, whilst wearing a masculine coded uniform of riding habits, white powdered hair and top hats. They became famous, ending up having lots of famous visitors who often left little gifts.
The Ladies is a novel that retells these events and, while it teases out some of the tensions within The Ladies’ lives, it never fully goes beyond being a retelling to a fully alive, flesh-and-blood novel. Events are rejigged, the point of view does delves into Eleanor and Sarah’s heads, but it never seems to grow from someone telling the reader their version of the events into a shaped and compelling work of literature. Their story is fascinating, and that made the book an enjoyable read, but it was (presumably) more accurately, and more engagingly told in Elizabeth Maven’s The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship.
Part of my ambivalence about the book is the use of tense. It swaps between past and present tense, seemingly at random. There are no chapters in the book but it’s split into four sections, yet the tense isn’t consistent within these sections. Going back to the book and skipping through to when the tense changes, I think any part about the two Ladies on their own or together are in present tense, and the parts when they are with someone else are in the past. If this is true, I think the idea is that when they are together, things are more intense and immediate but washed out when their essential togetherness is watered down by the presence of someone else. If so, it’s an interesting idea, but it comes across as muddled.
The Ladies have represented a lot to people. To the age they lived in, they were either ‘damned sapphists’, as Hester Thrale called them, or a symbol of a pure romantic friendship to be celebrated. Certainly, they saw themselves in a tradition of Rousseau and sought to bring a cosy, homely quality to their lives, especially expressed by their garden. To many queer people today they represent an ideal, a happy and fulfilled domestic life. Anne Lister even went to meet them to see how a same sex ‘marriage’ could work. The Ladies themselves were indignant about any sexual aspersions being cast on them, but Grumbach’s novel centres their sexual life as the anchor of the relationship, with their shared bed being a separate and better world. (That said, it’s never an explicit book).
The most interesting thing the book does, is poke some criticisms into the life the Ladies built together. Their cosy life of reading, sewing and walking in the gardens is one that has been celebrated as ideal. Personally, it seems like a very heaven to me. However, the book pulls at a divide between the home they built in Wales and a sense of exile from their families in Ireland. There’s a sense that the very routine and domestic life they lived also served as something of a prison.
The most novelistic parts of the book happen at the beginning, where the Ladies formed their relationship, prepared an escape, made it and then were captured before making an arrangement to be allowed to go off together. The characterisation of Eleanor’s parents and Sarah’s gropey guardian are often stronger than the characterisation of the Ladies themselves. It’s quite a gripping beginning.
The flattest section is at the end, entitled ‘visitors’, which is largely a description of all the people that visited their houses and the Ladies’ slow decline. The book starts to come to a conclusion about their relationship at this part, and it’s an interesting an nuanced one. Their relationship was intense and fulfilling but in being so central to them it trapped them together and denied them access to the rest of the world. It seems their relationship was enough for them, which is brilliant, but if it hadn’t been, it would have been a slow suffocation.
Personally, this book has reenforced me an important lesson as I am writing a book featuring real historical people. That the book needs to be a novel as well as a retelling.
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