The Ladies of Llangollen by Elizabeth Mavor

Author:Elizabeth Mavor [Mavor, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-95395620-3
Publisher: Moonrise Press
Published: 2011-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Around them the times continued uneasy: not only was Jacobinism threatening but financial disruption, the complexities of paper money contributing to the failure of numerous private banks. Harriet Bowdler was to write to them of a family known to her where the father was actually in hiding, ‘a Banker is liable to arrest for every five guinea Bill, and it is impossible to know into what wretched hands they may fall’.23 Rebellion too was imminent in Ireland, and no one, not even the Austrians, seemed capable of holding the terrible French. The Ladies consoled themselves for the horror of the times by taking refuge in Judgement Day prophesies and in learning Spanish. In April 1793 Sarah was able to report to MrsTighe that Eleanor was able to read ‘…whole Cantos of the Araucana without even once or twice looking into the dictionary’24 while she herself was able to read three or four successive lines after her dearest Better Half had explained them to her,

But in spite of such pleasant diversions money affairs still clamoured for attention, for neither Lady Douglas’s new pension, which took effect that June, nor yet their own very considerable retrenchment, could mitigate the effect of steeply rising prices.

A certain amount of what would seem to have been well-justified spleen was now directed at Eleanor’s sister-in-law in their correspondence. ‘She knows that one hundred pounds would remove any present or future pecuniary thorn from our pillows — that one syllable from her, would instantly procure it, for my B. has been besought to utter that syllable in vain…’ Sarah wrote indignantly to MrsTighe that October on behalf of Eleanor, ‘the Sole’ in Sarah’s opinion ‘Inheritrix of all the Ormonde Virtues’. She ended the letter a day later after having just heard the appalling news from Europe: ‘Alas! for the poor Queen of France!’ and she concluded with the diurnal refrain, not only common to them now but to MrsPiozzi and all like ladies, ‘don’t you think the end of the world approaches?’25

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