On a stormy night in 1778, Lady Eleanor Butler put on men’s clothes, climbed out the window of her aristocratic home at Kilkenny Castle, and made her way to Woodstock, 12 miles away. She was riding a horse for the first time in her life. Her object? Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who at the same was climbing out of her own window, in men’s clothing, with her dog Frisk and a loaded pistol. Meet the A Very Queer Romance, the coolest lady-lovers you’ve never heard of.
Romantic friends: the A Very Queer Romance
PHOTOS WELLCOME LIBRARY, LONDON
Lady Eleanor Butler was born in 1739 into one of the most prestigious families in Ireland. She enjoyed a good education and was by all accounts a bit of an eccentric bookworm. She had received several proposals of marriage but never gave away her hand. A potential suitor once said that she was “a woman that no man will conquer”. Instead she was to be conquered by the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby.