Page 69 - All About History - Issue 54-17

Regency women

Charlotte and Sarah lived
Mary Shelley jointly signed
together in Plas Newydd
near Llangollen for over 50
years and their letters were

30 August 1797 — 1 February 1851

Author, traveller and all-round scandalous sort,
Mary Shelley gave us much more than a monster!

Mary Shelley had form from the moment of her birth. She
was the daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
and anarchist thinker William Godwin. At 16 she ran away
with Romantic poet and married man Percy Bysshe Shelley
and together began one of the world’s most celebrated and
tumultuous romances.
Mary fell pregnant by her lover, but their child was born
prematurely in February 1815 and didn’t survive. She rode
out a storm of criticism and social isolation to remain with
Percy and when his wife, Harriet, committed suicide in 1816,
the couple married.
In 1816, they travelled to Geneva to summer with Lord
Byron and his friend Dr John Polidori in the Villa Diodati. Plas Newydd in 1840.
When Byron suggested that the guests each write a ghost Today it’s a museum
story, Mary experienced a waking dream that inspired her to dedicated to the women
write Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus.
The book took two years to complete while Mary was also
busy writing an account of her travels in Europe. Yet it was
Frankenstein, a masterpiece of Gothic literature and trailblazer
for science fiction, that caused a sensation. Sadly Mary, The Ladies of Llangollen:
afflicted with depression, could never fully enjoy her success.
She died more than 30 years after her husband yet lives on
today as a literary legend, the creator of one of fiction’s most Eleanor Charlotte Butler
famous monsters.
& Sarah Ponsonby

11 May 1739 — 2 June 1829 (Eleanor)
1755 — 9 December 1831 (Sarah)
Faced with forced marriages, two ladies eloped to live life on
their own terms

Eleanor and Sarah were two young ladies from Ireland with a dream: they
wanted to live together, free from meddling husbands. Their dream became
a reality in 1780 when they fled Kilkenny for Llangollen in Wales and set up
home in a Gothic house called Plas Newydd.
Here they indulged their love of botany and architecture, plunging
headfirst into a total restructure of their home. They cultivated the
gardens and rebuilt the house to their own specifications, creating a Gothic
architectural fantasy. Rejected by their families, they needed only each other,
After Percy’s death, Mary and together they created the idyll that they had always dreamed of sharing.
worked hard writing more With little interest in society or traditional feminine pursuits, these unusual
books to support herself
and her only surviving son, ladies became unlikely celebrities thanks to their unconventional relationship.
Percy Florence They were given a royal pension and visitors flocked to see them in their
own little piece of rural heaven.
Although the nature of Eleanor and Sarah’s relationship was never
confirmed, the ladies of Llangollen lived together for half a century as
though they were a married couple. They died within two years of one
another and the people of their adopted homeland honour them to this day.
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