As a young teenager in late-1990s Kilkenny, my queerness was very often presented back to me as something profoundly shameful, something to be hidden or disposed of with urgency. That shame wasn’t mine, at first - it was gifted to me by a fair portion of the other boys at school. I was spat at, shoved and tripped in the corridors, not to mention the incessant name-calling. Once, another boy pressed a knife to my throat, apparently offended that my circle of friends were all girls. Try as I might, this was not a place I felt I belonged.
And so, the boy who once swished down the corridor after home economics channelling Posh Spice began to edit himself. I deliberately tried to change the way I spoke, walked and sat to “be less gay”. It’s no surprise I later ended up in London training as an actor. I was already used to playing a part. Because of this, I am of a time and a place that meant I never felt sure how, or if, my Irishness and my queerness might comfortably meet.
Things are different now. The signing of the Thirty-fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Bill was a landmark moment, of course. But in researching Queer Georgians, I unexpectedly found myself dragged back to Kilkenny in a profoundly personal way. What I uncovered was a queer Irish history that was not entirely absent but had long been cast aside. It was a history I could have done with knowing at 13. And so, in writing, I met my Georgian forebearers on the very streets I had once desperately needed to leave behind.
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Though long celebrated in Wales, and Britain more generally, the story of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, better known as the Ladies of Llangollen, has rarely been claimed as part of our Irish story. Anne Lister of Gentleman Jack fame certainly thought their Irishness was key to understanding them. After visiting Miss Ponsonby at their famous cottage in Llangollen, Lister confided to her diary that to get to know their real history, “much, or all, depends upon the story of their former lives, the period passed before they lived together, that feverish dream called youth”. And she was right. For it was in Kilkenny, not in Wales, that Eleanor and Sarah’s lifelong partnership was truly forged.
RM Block
Born into wealthy families, both women were expected to take their place within the social machinery of 18th-century Ireland. Eleanor, the elder of the two, was “masculine”, bookish, strong-willed and intellectually ambitious. Sarah was younger, artistic and strikingly independent. What united them was not only their intense love and devotion to one another, but a shared refusal to accept the futures laid out for them by their families: marriage to boring men from their own social class, the narrowing confines of heteroregulated domestic life, the polite expectations of Georgian society. Instead, they dreamed of making a life together on their own terms.
Their plan was bold but simple: they would run away to England, where they could live together. They secretly plotted their escape, gathering disguises, letters, pet dogs and a pistol. They got away too, to Waterford, where they awaited a boat to take them to their new life. Little did they know, an item of clothing had slipped from their baggage and led their families right to them. Dogs yapped, pistols were drawn but, ultimately, Eleanor and Sarah were forced asunder and confined to the care of their respective relatives.
Kilkenny society erupted with speculation. Were they mad? Deluded? Ruined? Many could not fathom the idea that Eleanor and Sarah had escaped together and assumed they had secret beaus hiding somewhere in the countryside. What, after all, would two women want with running away together? These whispers and accusations revealed the deep anxieties Georgian Ireland harboured about women who stepped outside of their allotted roles. Marriage was meant to tether women to duty and propriety. By rejecting that, Eleanor and Sarah’s love sought to turn the order of the world on its head.
Ultimately, hidden away at the Ponsonby’s home, Woodstock, the ladies managed to convince their families that there was no use in attempting to keep them apart and both families granted them endowments for life as long as they pledged never to return to Ireland. They left Kilkenny behind and, in 1780, settled in the small Welsh town of Llangollen. There they fashioned their now-famous home, Plas Newydd, which drew poets, intellectuals and aristocrats from across Europe. Writers such as Wordsworth and Shelley visited them, while members of the royal family acknowledged their union as marriage-like. Theirs was, undoubtedly, a quiet, queer revolution.
They were exceptional, but they were not alone - across Britain and Ireland, queer people of all backgrounds were carving out ways to live, to connect and to endure. Some sought refuge in partnerships like Eleanor and Sarah’s; others built vibrant, if fragile, communities in the backstreets of working-class neighbourhoods. Together, their lives reveal a world far richer, queerer and more resilient than we might imagine when we think of the 18th century.
The “molly houses” are among the most vivid examples. These were precarious places, under regular, moralising surveillance and yet they were also places where gay or bisexual men, known as “mollies” at the time, could meet in relative safety. The mollies, the archive tells us, were given female nicknames, or “maiden names”, which both marked them out as members of a wider queer community and hinted at their lives or professions beyond the molly house. Martin Mackintosh, an orange-seller in Covent Garden was known as “Orange Deb”, for instance. Deb brushed shoulders with other figures such as “Dip-Candle Mary”,’ a candlemaker; the “Duchess of Camomile”, named for his address on Camomile Street; “Old Fish Hannah”, a fish-seller; and the wonderfully enigmatic “Susan Guzzle”, whose name has no obvious origin (though the possibilities are easy enough to imagine).
Commentators from the time tell us that some of these men also wore women’s clothing and ceremonies mimicking marriage were performed while the proprietress of the house, Mother Clap, provided rooms for sex. These molly houses were a rare chance for these men to affirm desire, to name it, to give it shape, but the danger was all too real: raids could and did end in imprisonment or the gallows. But such was the need. To risk everything for a few hours of recognition tells us just how essential community was, and how much people were willing to gamble for it.
Not all queer lives followed this path of ritual and concealment. Some were lived more quietly. John Chute of the Vyne in Hampshire, for example, never married and instead built his life around enduring friendships and an artistic circle that sustained him for decades. His most intimate, loving relationship was with another man, Francis Whithed, and together they were known to their group of bachelor friends as “The Chuteheds” - an acknowledgement of their marriage-like coupling and intimacy. Chute’s was not a life of scandal or flight, but of steady belonging - proof that queer networks existed across the social spectrum, sometimes hiding in plain sight.
And then there was Miss Mary Jones. Mary’s existence unsettled the gender categories on which Enlightenment society supposedly depended. A black sex worker who had transed her gender identity, Mary was arrested for theft in New York in 1836 and was quickly dubbed the “Man-Monster” by a rabid press. When she arrived in court for her trail, dressed in female attire, the gathered men prodded and poked her. They ripped the wig from her head. Throughout, Mary remained the very model of decency and resilience. The resulting court transcripts and newspaper reports, though designed to ridicule, also give us glimpses of her extraordinary life. Mary tells us she spent her life as a woman mainly among “people of my own Colour”, for instance. The press might have tried to turn her into a spectacle, but beneath the sneering tone lies something extraordinary: a life we would now identify as trans, lived, however precariously, in the early 19th century, despite claims by people such as Elon Musk that trans identities are a 21st-century phenomenon resulting from a “woke mind virus”. He is wrong. Mary Jones shows us that he is wrong and forces us to reckon with the fact that the diversity of genders and sexualities we recognise today was not invented in the modern era. It has always been there, targeted but persistent. Mary must not be ignored.
Today, at Woodstock House, where Sarah Ponsonby once lived, the grand Palladian house is a ruin, its walls blasted during the Civil War. Mostly you’ll find amiable parkland, teas and coffees on tap and maniacal children on scooters bombing around the place. Yet when I take a saunter under the monkey puzzle trees, I become acutely aware that this is also the site of significant queer Georgian revolt. Right here in Kilkenny. For it was here that Sarah and Eleanor first began planning for their future life together. And this, for me at least, is utterly priceless.
As someone who once felt so ill at ease with how my queerness was stifled in Kilkenny, this history has changed how I feel when I come home now. Where I once felt strange, estranged, self-conscious or even embarrassed to be there, I now have been gifted a new sense of belonging. I am of that land, as they were, and like them, I carry that place with me. It is part of my history. It is part of our shared history.
That is what writing Queer Georgians gave me: not just a recovery of lost lives, but the discovery that those lives speak directly to ours. In a world where queer rights and dignities are again being questioned and pared back, these histories matter more than ever. To recover them is to stand on steadier ground, to face what lies ahead with the strength of centuries at our back. Our queerness is timeless. It runs through the ancient limestone underfoot and hangs in droplets from the sturdy boughs of the evergreen. These are our roots; feel how mighty they are.
Queer Georgians by Anthony Delaney is published by Doubleday
