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The Romantic Plas Newydd

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  • Fig. 4: Picture of the Ladies’ bedroom, collected in Trinity College Library, numbered Box 3.112-7. [JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.3847486?searchText=the+Ladies+of+Llangollen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dthe%2BLadies%2Bof%2BLlangollen%26groupefq%3DWyJjb250cmlidXRlZF9pbWFnZXMiXQ%253D%253D%26efqs%3DeyJjdHkiOlsiWTI5dWRISnBZblYwWldSZmFXMWhaMlZ6Il19%26doi%3D10.2307%252Fcommunity.3847484&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6646_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A07d82867d7d1d311308952b3c4533591&searchkey=1669802469552)
  • Fig. 5: Picture of living room of the Plas Newydd, collected in Trinity College Library, numbered Box 3.112-10. [JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.3847486?searchText=the+Ladies+of+Llangollen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dthe%2BLadies%2Bof%2BLlangollen%26groupefq%3DWyJjb250cmlidXRlZF9pbWFnZXMiXQ%253D%253D%26efqs%3DeyJjdHkiOlsiWTI5dWRISnBZblYwWldSZmFXMWhaMlZ6Il19%26doi%3D10.2307%252Fcommunity.3847484&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6646_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A07d82867d7d1d311308952b3c4533591&searchkey=1669802469552)
  • Fig. 6: The Plas Newydd with its outside view, painted by Sarah Ponsonby and bound in the booklet given to Lady Douglas in 1788. [Houghton Library](https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umac/detail.action?docID=1836106&pq-origsite=primo)
  • Fig. 7: Colored picture of the Plas Newydd, collected in Trinity College, Watkinson Library, numbered Box 3.112-5 [JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.3847484?searchText=the+Ladies+of+Llangollen&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dthe%2BLadies%2Bof%2BLlangollen%26groupefq%3DWyJjb250cmlidXRlZF9pbWFnZXMiXQ%253D%253D%26efqs%3DeyJjdHkiOlsiWTI5dWRISnBZblYwWldSZmFXMWhaMlZ6Il19&ab_segments=0%2FSYC-6646_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A5f2d429fb087cfe08db590d2e980bfe0&searchkey=1669800810146)

The cottage drawn on the cups is called Plas Newydd (“New Mansion”), a celebrated, elegant, and exquisite cottage ornée (figs. 4 & 5) where its owners, the Ladies of Llangollen, lived together for nearly fifty years.

After Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby left their native Ireland for North Wales on May 9, 1778, they settled in Llangollen, a small Welsh town. A five-room stone cottage became their home in 1780. When the Ladies moved in, the cottage was nothing more than a small and unassuming village house. However, over the decades they turned it into an exquisitely ornamented cottage. Nowadays it is a famous tourist attraction in Wales and opens to the public regularly.

Their activities hovered between immersing themselves in the intellectual world and returning to nature, which Eleanor Butler called “exquisite retirement”: they read and wrote in their small library or went on long walks, and sometimes Ponsonby painted her watercolor pictures, one of which depicts the cottage (fig. 6, compare to fig. 7).

However, it was their relationship with British contemporary celebrities that made them well-known to British society. The Duke of Wellington, Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Anne Lister, William Wordsworth, and countless other people from the British upper class at that time - all of them had interacted with the Ladies, and some of them had particularly favorable relationships with them. For instance, the romantic poet William Wordsworth even wrote a sonnet to describe Plas Newydd and to convey his admiration for the relationship of its owners. These not only attest to their status in the social circles of the British upper class at that time, but also reflect their same-class contemporaries’ general perceptions of female same-sex intimacy. For more relevant information:

  1. William Wordsworth’s sonnethttps://pastplace.exeter.ac.uk/2014/09/poem-of-the-week-wordsworth-at-plas-newydd/

  2. Official website of Plas Newyddhttps://www.llangollen.org.uk/index.php/things-to-do/attractions/item/61-plas-newydd-the-ladies-of-llangollen