University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 368
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-1-61148-761-9 • Hardback • April 2017 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-1-61148-762-6 • eBook • April 2017 • $135.50 • (£105.00)
Fiona Brideoake is assistant professor in the literature department at American University.
Introduction: Casting Butler and Ponsonby: Before ‘the Ladies of Llangollen’
Chapter 1: “Sketched by many hands”: Narrating Butler and Ponsonby
Chapter 2: Engendering the Ladies: Romantic Friendship, Gender Difference and Queer Critical Practice
Chapter 3: Becoming the Ladies of Llangollen
Chapter 4: “[K]eep yourself in your own persons, where you are”: Butler and
Ponsonby’s Transformation of Plas newydd
Chapter 5: ‘The spirit of blue-stockingism’: Were the Ladies of Llangollen ‘Blue’?
Chapter 6: “Love, above the reach of time”: Butler and Ponsonby and the
Performance of Romanticism
Chapter 7: ‘The Future Arrives Late’: Butler and Ponsonby and their
‘Spiritual Descendents,’ 1928-37
Afterword
Bibliography
About the Author
Fiona Brideoake’s is by far the best account of the Ladies to have appeared in some time. It is generous with earlier accounts, deeply learned and engaged with all scholars of lesbianism and the history of sexuality. It also contextualizes the Ladies brilliantly and makes great sense of their choice of a house and how they decorated. I cannot imagine a more informed or more exhilarating account of the Ladies of Langollen. This will be a book that is treasured by students and scholars as well as anyone interested in the history of ‘romantic friendship’ between women.
— George E. Haggerty, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside
The first book about Butler and Ponsonby in almost half a century, The Ladies of Llangollen does brilliant justice to the famous female couple about whom our knowledge will always be maddeningly limited. Blending biography and critical history, Fiona Brideoake reads the Ladies through their successive afterlives, grappling with the ways in which they have been appropriated and analyzed, mythologized and mystified in tandem with shifting sexual, social, and aesthetic norms. In so doing, The Ladies of Llangollen models a new approach to sexual history that could not be better suited to our own queer times.
— Susan Lanser, Brandeis University