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."
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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.
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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)
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