Best known as the Ladies of Llangollen, after the Welsh village where they lived in "delicious Retirement," Butler and Ponsonby were daughters of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency who eloped together in 1778. Ponsonby, sixteen years Butler's junior, lost both parents in early childhood and her stepmother when she was thirteen. Given into the care of her father's cousin Lady Betty Fownes, she was sent to Miss Parke's boarding school in Kilkenny.

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There, in 1768, she met Butler, youngest daughter in a Catholic branch of an ancient and noble family of Kilkenny. Educated in an English Benedictine convent in France, Butler became Ponsonby's intellectual mentor and intimate friend. After Ponsonby left Miss Parke's in 1773, the two women entered upon a secret correspondence and determined to live together.

Butler and Ponsonby's first elopement failed; they were discovered, returned, and separated by their two families. Eleanor was urged to a convent, whereas Sarah, it was hoped, would be married. When both women resisted these pressures and Sarah threatened to make public the attentions of her guardian's husband, the families relented and the women fled to Wales. They took a cottage, which they named Plas Newydd, and there settled for the rest of their long lives.

The Ladies' pastoral retreat drew many prominent visitors, including Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Anna Seward, and Stéphanie de Genlis. Their mutual attachment, and their life of shared reading, writing, walking, and gardening, were celebrated and mythologized in such contemporary writings as Seward's "Llangollen Vale" and Wordsworth's "Sonnet Composed at Plas Newydd."

The women shared bed, board, books, income, and daily walks; dressed similarly in men's waistcoats and women's skirts; signed their correspondence jointly; named one of their dogs Sappho; and refused to spend even one night away from home. Butler's journals refer to Ponsonby as "my Beloved" and "my sweet love," describe physical attentions bestowed for headaches and illnesses, and express the couple's longings, when visitors were too plentiful, to be alone again.

There has been considerable debate about whether Butler and Ponsonby's union should be labeled "lesbian." During their lifetime, implications of homosexuality circulated occasionally in the press and among visitors, although their upperclass status and connections undoubtedly protected them.

Their neighbor Hester Thrale Piozzi suspected them of ; Genlis considered them imprudent victims of an excessive sensibility. Anne Lister, the Yorkshire woman who recorded her own homosexual activities in coded diaries, wrote after visiting Llangollen in 1822, "I cannot help thinking that surely it was not Platonic. Heaven forgive me, but I look within myself & doubt."

Whether the Ladies of Llangollen have been regarded as celibate or sexual, their relationship has emblematized "romantic friendship" for over two centuries. Deeply immersed in the literary culture of their day as readers, conversationalists, and occasional writers, they have also remained literary subjects.

Colette speculates about them in The Pure and the Impure (1928), Constance Stallard dramatizes their relationship in "The Ladies of Llangollen" (1955), and novels by Doris Grumbach (The Ladies, 1984) and Morgan Graham (These Lovers Fled Away, 1988) imagine their life. Elizabeth Mavor's 1971 biography remains the major resource for scholars; Mavor's selections from Butler's and Ponsonby's private writings is also a valuable textual source.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

In her novels, especially those based on the lives of actual people, Doris Grumbach treats homosexual relationships matter-of-factly as an integral part of the human landscape.