Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the Cottage Ornée

In 1778 Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped from their families in Ireland to begin a life together, eventually settling on the outskirts of Llangollen, Wales, in a small cottage they christened Plas Newydd. Butler and Ponsonby undertook a number of elaborate architectural projects at Plas Newydd over the course of roughly thirty-five years, turning what had been an undistinguished example of the local architectural vernacular into a heavily ornamented, artfully contrived spectacle, a cottage ornée. This essay explores the relationship between Butler and Ponsonby's manifold cottage industries and the fictions of gender and sex that attended an emerging notion of bourgeois domesticity. Plas Newydd made possible a complex performance of bourgeois domestic life, one that both mirrored and inverted the imperatives of the heterosexual family unit. In the example of their cottage, and through their strategic deployment of cottage discourse, the "Ladies of Llangollen," as Butler and Ponsonby came to be called, presented to women a viable alternative to the impositions of patriarchal domestic arrangements; concurrent with Plas Newydd's fame, the design, commission, and marketing of cottages ornées, though always catering to the increasingly codified requisites of the bourgeois family, begin to reflect the needs and desires of independent female householders. In this way the Ladies' example of female romantic friendship, invested as it was in the material arrangements of their cottage home, effected real change for women, from the smaller group who shared their social status (and might themselves build a cottage) to the broader circle inescapably familiar with the popular craze for cottages and conversant in cottage ideology