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June 2

06-02 TABLE of CONTENTS: Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTE by Elizabeth Mavor. Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler On June 2, 1829, Lady Eleanor Butler died.       Sarah Ponsonby lived but two more years before again lying down again next to Lady Eleanor as she had every night for 51 years - two women who had "felt themselves bound to give to the world, an example of perfect friendship..." according to a contemporary.       Butler, 39, and Ponsonby, 23, had run away together in 1778 over the violent objections of their fashionable Irish families when Sarah had announced she would "live and die with Miss Butler."       The couple settled in Llangollen, Wales, and created a home and garden of such reputation that even the Queen of England asked for its plans. Dozens of the major figure of the era visited them including Charles Darwin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Sir Walter Scott. The Duke of Wellington was a close friend. William Wordsworth wrote while staying in their cottage.       Butler and Ponsonby, voracious readers and intellectual giants, created a place of peace, of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation that was famous throughout Europe. It was almost a requirement that celebrities visiting England venture into Wales to visit "the ladies."       In Elizabeth Mavor's painstakingly researched and respected book The Ladies of Llangollen, she writes: "I have preferred the terms of romantic friendship (a once flourishing but now lost relationship) as more liberal and inclusive and better suited to the diffuse feminine nature ... such friendships could be before they were biologically and thus prejudicially defined (by Freud). Depending as they did upon time and leisure, they were aristocratic, they were idealistic, blissfully free, allowing for a dimension of sympathy between women that would not now be possible outside an avowedly lesbian connection. Indeed, much that we would now associate solely with a sexual attachment is contained in romantic friends: tenderness, loyalty, sensibility, shared beds, shared tastes, coquetry, even passion." | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 06-02 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS B. 06-02-1731, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, American-Colonial widowed woman of great wealth who married an unsuccessful military man George Washington allowing him to become a man of leisure.       Her holding included 17,000 acres of farmland and 300 slaves. B. 06-02-1816, Grace Aguilar, novelist, poet, and observor of Jewish history. She criticized Judaism for its treatment of women in Spirit of Judaism (1842). B. 06-02-1875, Dame W. Cullis, lectured throughout the U.S. during WW II on the British women's experience in the war effort. She advised American woman to wait until their particular field of endeavor was needed rather making the mistake that British women did in rushing to help and being assigned to jobs they were not best at.       For 40 years she was instructor and finally professor in physiology. She was the first woman examiner of the Board of Medicine, London University (1913). B. 06-02-1890, Hedda Hopper, U.S. Hollywood gossip columnist who rivaled Louella Parsons in power over the movie industry and its actors through her radio shows and newspaper columns. She became an ultra-right conservative activist. B. 06-02-1890, Marjorie Hill Allee, U.S. author. She wrote primarily for older juvenile readers. Her work is much discounted for being of the period and romantic, but her female character are strong-minded who see great possibilities within themselves. Her best know books are, A House of Her Own (1934) and The Great Tradition (1937. B. 06-02-1912 , Elizabeth (Joan Eugenia) Mortimer, the first member of the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force to win a Military Medal. While assigned to the switchboard at an RAF field, she refused to take shelter and continued to relay essential information as the Germans saturated the airfield with bombs.       As soon as the Germans cleared, she rushed to the field and placed red flags at the unexploded bombs to warn returning fighter pilots.       One of the bombs exploded nearby and seriously damaged her hearing. After her discharge, she did domestic work to supplement her small disability pension and support her widowed mother. B. 06-02-1913, Barbara Pym, British author who wrote novels of manners in upper middle class England set in quiet English places and peopled, primarily with women - all done in a modern-day Austen manner. Her A Very Private Eye) (1984) is autobiographical. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR MAVOR, ELIZABETH:       "Thus by the mysterious operation of time upon the popular imagination have two spinsters of no great beauty, of uncertain age, little money, living in a remote cottage, become a paradigm of the heart's desire... the perfect friends ."             Elizabeth Mavor (see above) | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |