 Welcome to the British Library and to the Chase of the Wild Goose. It's such a thrill to uncover the missing histories of our pioneering women and queer icons from the past. Tonight we're doing just that. You will meet the amazing Mary Gordon and the subject of her writing, Alana Butler and Sarah Ponsonby in the newly republished by Lurid Editions, which is available right here. If you look on the link beneath, you can just treat yourself straight away to this incredible book. We've got people joining from all over the world tonight, even as far away as New Zealand. So welcome to all our friends. Please join in with your questions and comments. You can drop them in any time in the box below. We absolutely love hearing from you and this time set aside at the end for your questions. And I also draw your attention to the donate button in case you feel that you'd like to support the British Library and sharing even more of its goodness. So let's crack on with a special welcome to our magnificent chair, Noreena Shopland, who's an LGBTQ plus historian, whose published works include A History of Women in Men's Clothes and Forbidden Lives, LGBT Stories from Wales. Noreena, could I so and over to you. Yeah, thank you very much. It's lovely to be here this evening really looking forward to the discussions got lots of really interesting questions but as you said please if you have to do have any questions yourself pop them in the box. So what I'm going to do is, we're going to have the three speakers introduce themselves, and then we're going to have a series of questions, which all of them will answer. So to kick off, DM, would you like to do a brief introduction please. Yeah, for sure. Good evening everybody it's really great to be here and thank you for that introduction to the evening to be and Noreena. My name is DM with us. I'm the publisher of Lurid Editions. I'm also a lecturer in publishing at the University of Exeter. So Lurid Editions is essentially part of my research practice and I've also done a lot of research, archival research on the history of the Varago modern classics. I'm interested in the cultural dynamics of recovery and reclaiming forgotten texts forgotten voices and resituating them and repositioning them in the marketplace. So Lurid is is part of that project, and I'm particularly overjoyed that this is the first title that we've published because it's such a great book such a joyful book. I've seen already has brought so much happiness to people because of its joyfulness because it's, you know, really a celebration of one of the greatest queer love stories of all time. So it's great to be here to be discussing it with Francis Bingham and as an Aurene and Noreena as well who are all experts in the different dimensions of this amazing story. Thank you very much. Alison, please. So yeah, I'm my name is Alison or and I'm very I'm delighted to be on this panel because the latest have been got one of being a, you know, of interest to me for decades I guess, and I'm historian of lesbian queer and LGBTQ history. I'm mainly in an academic setting and I'm currently a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and I used to work at Leeds Beckett University where I was professor of social and cultural history. I've been published quite a lot really on lesbian history and queer history, including, well, including lesbian history source book and husband was a woman which was published back in 2007 and most recently, queer beyond London with Matt cook. And over the last 20 years, 15 to 20 years, I've become increasingly interested in queer heritage, you know the buildings and the places which are resonant with queer histories. So I've been visiting class now if the latest home since well at least the 1990s and I've written about it and about other lesbian and queer places not only kind of elite historic houses but also everyday heritage on our streets and, you know, next door, and I led a project called Pride of Place with Historic England back in, well a few years ago now which is still available online. Thanks. Thank you very much. And Francis please. I am a London based writer, just down the road from British Library in fact. And my most recent book was this one Valentine Act and transgressive life, which was published in 2021 from handheld press. And it was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and given an August Foundation Award, which I'm very happy about. And it's about the poet who was so we can tell you all as lover. And part of my research for it involved reading the complete journals of both writers. So I've developed a great interest in journals and diaries, and I'm currently working on a book about modernist writers journal writing. And I finished a novel called Psychic Lives, which is about queer spiritualism in the 1930s. So this evening's conversation covers several of my special interests. Thank you very much. You're all so impressive. I just love your work and I've read obviously a lot by by both Alison and Francis so great. Thank you. So is DM. Could you tell us first of all, a little bit more background to how you came to want to republish chase the wild goose, what inspired you and can you outline some of the difficulties you've experienced and some of the joys. For sure. So really the root of me republishing chase the wild goose was a visit to plus an hour in, I think it was 2019. I went with some friends who were holidaying in North Wales. I've always wanted to go to plus an hour and, you know, growing up as a queer person you hear the words ladies of Clangochlan. And I wanted to investigate more about who they were and to visit their home so it was a beautiful sunny day in the middle of August. We turned up at plus now it and we're just utterly, utterly enchanted by the place. Indeed, perhaps had a Mary Gordon esk experience of being kind of lightly haunted in a very positive way by the spirit of the ladies. And so I travelled at the Gothic carvings in the house, the perfume, the bottles to perfume the carpet, the oil painting of tatters and her kittens, the oil painting of the cats of the ladies of Clangochlan. So this whole myth about them being, or the question of whether or not they were, they were queer or Levians or whatever and then you see the oil painting of the cats and the kittens and it's just it's unquestionable. So, and we also walked around what the ladies of Clangochlan called the home circuit which is the beautiful gardens, and the little stream it's not a little stream it's actually quite a big, big water. Don't know what it is it's like a water feature in their garden and we walked around it it was such a peaceful restorative healing inspiring wondrous experience. And when I returned back to my life in Bristol, kind of just became a bit obsessed on a low level with the ladies of Clangochlan and started to look around see what was written about them. And I found Mary Gordon's book. And I think lockdown happened, you know the pandemic happened. Soon after, but I managed to get a copy of Chase the Wild Goose, the Hogarth Press edition because it was first published by the Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Wolfs Hogarth Press in 1936. And I got a second edition of the of the of the book so it was it went into a second print run the first print run was around 2000 copies. And then it was successful enough and sold well enough to have another print run so I was sat there, kind of gobbling up this this wonderful story, feeling really happy because it's a happy book, it's a fun book it's a bit like, it's like reading fan fiction Mary Gordon is a fan of the ladies of Clangochlan she gives them these these fantastic and fantastic voices and this this fantasy of their voices she you know she imagined them as these wonderful kind of butch superstars, I think, in places. And so it was just really wonderful to read that story, and I couldn't believe it was, it was out of print. And I sat there and I just thought well, I've done a lot this research around the Varago modern classics and had done some publishing in the past. And I suppose I was thinking well maybe, maybe I should reprint it and then as time went on. I just decided to set up a publishing company and the idea of Lurid Editions came to me. Again, partly inspired by my research in Varago and book history so thinking about the, if you haven't seen the books, they're here, it's a bit blurry, they've got a very strong color profile to them their future. I was thinking about the history of successful publishing companies, and all and publishing series and they all have a very strong color profile if you think about Penguin with the orange covers. Heineman African writer series also had orange covers, the contemporary Fitzcarraldo editions with their lovely blue covers and this is, you know, I will be honest it is a rip off of the Fitzcarraldo. It's an appropriation, all publishing is a constant appropriation of the design decisions that have preceded it so I will make no apology for that act of appropriation but I thought the one color that hasn't really been done in a uniform way is fuchsia. So I like fuchsia so that's the reason behind that and all Lurid books will have lovely fuchsia covers. So there was a design concept and a publishing concept that came to me quite vividly actually at the same time. And, you know, the wheels just kind of went in motion and it just didn't just happen but it kind of it kind of just did happen. And then I set up Lurid as a company. And, and then sort of last year I did get the job at Exeter and kind of framed it as part of my publishing practice, my research practice so to speak which it is. And, yeah, so I went from there in terms of what was it the pleasures and the challenges with that about the question Narina, the challenges of it. The difficulties and the joys I think I put in. The difficulties and the joys. Haven't really faced any difficulties thus far it's been a pretty smooth run, to be honest, and with this particular book. It's been, it's been overwhelmingly frictionless, I would say. I had it's a very easy in a way it's not an easy book to situate in the marketplace but I was just I was just really lucky that because I had worked at the British Library as well I was able to ask, you know people for help with getting things like blurbs like Sarah Waters for example has written a lovely blurb for that for the front cover. So I just I pulled out a lot of favors after a lot of people and they kind of responded very positively so it's sometimes it's like that with projects isn't it where people. They used to ask people to do things and they know what it is and they just they just say yes because it's it's a positive force in the world. And that's really what it's been like for, for this particular, this particular book it's been just been really successful and, you know, good. So I'm sure there'll be challenges in the future, undoubtedly. But I think, you know, maybe the ladies were tapping on my shoulder when I was, when I was at class now with and they needed a bit of they needed to be revived or something in this moment their story needed to be given a bit of a signal boost. Who knows. Thank you very much it's good to hear that so far it's been smooth money brilliant. Alison, if we could turn to you please can you tell us a bit more about the ladies as lesbian icons and symbols of love between women, who they were and how others saw them. Okay, well this could take an evening but yeah, I mean the ladies are actually Irish. Although obviously they've been really strongly associated with flangotlin and Wales. Well, ever since they moved there. Lady Eleanor Butler was from the Irish aristocracy Sarah Ponson be was also from a elite background. They met when Sarah was 13 and Eleanor was 29 so there was quite an age gap and fell in love forms a deep affection for each other. They met when they could wrote to each other, and by all accounts, their, their bond was based on books and conversation and talking about ideas and so on. 10 years later, in 1778, they tried to run away together and the first time disguised in men's clothes and with the help of a couple of servants, but they were caught and brought home. Well, there was a lot of negotiation and a lot of bitter words around their relationship with their families because obviously it was a terrible scandal that they tried to do this. But eventually their families agreed to let them go in a kind of respectable fashion said they traveled together to Wales, a few months later, and traveled around Wales for a few months and then found the cottage which is on the edge of the town of flangotlin, because they're from 1780 for 50 years until their deaths in 1829 for Eleanor Butler and 1831 for Sarah Ponson be. But eloping you know eloping is to women together was very dramatic, I mean it was something which drew attention to them and their families, and you know it's very strong statement of their desire to live together. So, you know, in themselves they're at that they are of such importance, and yeah, it's hardly surprising that they became lesbian and queer icons. So what they did in Wales was they, they lived out a version of rural romanticism which was at that point very fashionable, which supposedly involved rejecting worldly society and living the late 18th century version of the simple life to voted to their garden animals, their friends, their books and self improvement really learning foreign languages and so on. By the standards of their own class they didn't have much money, although they always had one or two at least servants, but they did work their aristocratic connections and got pensions from various people tried to sort of leverage money out of their families and gradually became, you know a bit comfortably off. What's important about their ladies is that they become celebrities in their own lifetimes, I mean they really do they were visited by friends and acquaintances a lot of them from aristocratic even royal families and literary visitors. So they and they were written about society magazines of the era, and, and you know yeah their lifestyle resonated with this idea of romanticism, and as North Wales as a region became part of a kind of genteel tourist trail because it's you know very beautiful. And it was kind of opening up there. And it was on the routes to the fact to get the ferry to go to Ireland so they were not actually retiring from society society came to visit them over the years. I could give you a list of famous people who visited them the Duke of Wellington William Wordsworth who later on wrote a poem about them Josiah which would the Pope and the stewards, and so on, and many many others. Even before, even within their own lifetimes there were, there was a pottery dinner service or to created names after the ladies of Langoslund certainly by the mid 19th century, after their deaths, you could buy figurines of them, you could buy all sorts of tourist souvenirs of the ladies of Langoslund. So how are they seen by others well they, they were certainly seen by many people as eccentric. But because it was described as romantic friendship they were their partnership was maybe just about socially acceptable and it was certainly cemented as such by the fact that you know their visitors included the great and the good. In terms of social hierarchy they were the most elite people living in the neighborhood. So that also protected them some extent from negative commentary although they did come in for ridicule and negative commentary from some people but then on the other side there were a lot of admirers and supporters. And there was a sort of libelous attack on them in 1790 the famous general evening post article, which suggested that they had refused refused marriage in order to elope together and also described as being the masculine one and Sarah Ponson be as being that the feminine that you're taking the feminine role in the household. And that's too many people sort of suggested a certain degree of perverse perversity. And the ladies were really really cross about it and threatened to sue for libel they didn't in fact and their friends kind of rallied around and said, Oh look, it'll blow over which which it did. And the concept of sex between women women were certainly around in the 18th century I mean, you know when, when has it not been but it's you know who knows what when and how is it names and how how how women couples talked about. It's not named a suction polite society, but the diarist author and gossip had Hester frail piozzi described the lady she was quite fascinated by lesbian she described the society women as bath as the unclean birds of bath or something like similar phrase to that. And she described the ladies in an unpublished diary as quote Dan Safas. And so, you know some people did associate them with the idea of sex between women but I mean, you know we have to to also say that, you know that diary wasn't ever published and was only kind of discovered, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, but at least by historians. It's different from aspersions being cast on them in, you know, the public print media. So generally they're accepted as a same sex couple in this in this notion contemporary notion of romantic friendship. But what I'm really interested in about the ladies is there is the way that they become icons of love between women and how women project their dreams and desire onto them particularly the ideal of having a kind of continuing long lasting domestic partnership with another woman. I'll mention a couple of early 19th century examples, which show kind of different versions, you know how they held how, you know, there are different versions of this already in their own lifetimes. The poet Anna Seward, who became a friend of theirs from the mid 1890s, and who wrote several poems about them she was very taken with the ladies and yeah she was quite an important friend and yeah, a letter writer and promote promoter of them in a sense. She herself had had an intense and passionate attachment to her friends on or a snade, kind of a quite say that name but another young woman but, and had lived with her for a bit but felt incredibly betrayed when an aura married and left her. So for Anna Seward, the ladies were role models, you know they'd achieved what she couldn't achieve which was this lifelong female partnership in life, not just in letters or not just in aspiration. On the other hand, and another of their call as much later on was the diarist who everybody knows of now, Anne Lister, or Gentleman Jack as the TV series has her. Anne Lister was of a generation below in age and a generation below and the ladies and also socially sort of below them she was she was from Halifax Gentry and was very sort of socially aspirational. And of course, through her diaries that and Lister herself had a series of sexual relationships with women lovers, and, you know, which were very colorful and which, you know she managed to live her life with, well, certainly the walker whom she did live with a few years of her life at Shipton Hall near Halifax. Anyway, after reading about the latest partnership earlier on and Lister visited Plasner with an 1822 and met Sarah Ponsonby who was quite elderly by then. And Lister was building her own identity as a woman who loved only the fairer sex in her own words. And she speculated in letters to her lover about whether the latest love for each other was the same kind as her own writing. I cannot help thinking that surely it was not platonic. Heaven forgive me but I look within myself and doubt. So here we've got Anne Lister kind of imagining this idealized sexual relationship that also has a lot has longevity and commitment and passion. She asks them, you know, whether they ever have little quarrels. And they, and Sarah says, Well, not really, which is probably a bit of an exaggeration. So again, Lister sort of seeking something through the ladies and her lover at the time, Marianne Lawton was a marriage woman and that relationship with her had persisted for many, many, many years was ultimately unsuccessful. And it was only later in the 1830s that Anne Lister settled down with Anne Walker. So in the 19th century women kind of had these different visions of her. And yeah, so we can leap on to Mary Gordon in the 1930s. And yeah, there were other examples as well kind of in between. I mean, I can say something about Mary Gordon unless. So we come back to Mary Gordon a bit later. Thank you very much indeed that that's great. I mean, of all the stuff you were saying, oh I kept thinking of all the questions I wanted to ask and follow up bits and, you know, particularly about the sort of the whole thing between romantic friendships and same sex relationships but maybe we can fit that in later on. So thank you for that Alison. Francis, can you put the chase into context as lesbian queer modernist texts, when it was published in the 1930s, please. Yes, well, one thing about the 1930s the key fact you have to remember is that the 1920s came first. And in 1928, the publication of Radcliffe Hall's Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf's Orlando are very important in the context of publication by the Hogoth Press. And unlike Orlando. The well really shows its age now. But it outraged the establishment. Then I think, particularly because it was written in a popular form. It really queered the romantic novel. And it's melodrama and lack of subtlety place it within that period genre. So it's like in the Lady Chastley trial, when the prosecuting council said, would you want your wife or your servants to read this book. Or the Sunday Express saying that they would prefer the famous quote, give a healthy boy or a healthy girl, prostitute acid, rather than the well of loneliness. This moral panic is because of the accessibility of the book. And it was a polemic, a book with a mission, demanding social change, understanding and acceptance of inverts. And the unhappy ending, the self hatred of the protagonist Steven are all considered authorial strategies to gain the reader sympathy. And this is a big contrast to lesbian characters during the gay 20s, who are very often the stock character of the mannish predatory lesbian with a capital L, which is never sympathetic. I'm thinking about Rosamond layman's dusty answer. The tall shell cat by Naomi Roy Smith. Extraordinary women by Compton Mackenzie, Elizabeth Burns the hotel which is bit less hostile but a very gloomy picture overall. And the Wells notorious obscenity trial culminated with the book being burnt in the furnaces down in the cellars of Scotland yard. It was a very British form of book burning, but it created a very hostile environment for any positive portrayal of inverts. I think it's worth remembering here that in 1921, there was a motion in Parliament to criminalize lesbian acts between women in the same way that male homosexuality was illegal. And I voted not to put it on the statute book, because it would acquaint women who'd never otherwise hear about it with this evil practice. And of course the obscenity trial did that and more. After that publishers had to be more cautious. But there was a paradox in which the censorship had actually created the very publicity and public interest, which the trial had aimed to repress. People referred to the self censorship, which in future writers might have to practice in a room of one's own. And I'm going to read this bit that's from one version of it. Chloe liked Olivia. The words came at the bottom of the page. The pages had stuck while fumbling to open them. They're flashed into my mind, the inevitable policeman, the summons, the order to attend the court, the dreary waiting, the magistrate coming in with a little bow, the glass of water, the counsel for the prosecution for the defense, the verdict, this book is obscene and flames rising, perhaps on Tower Hill, as they consumed masses of paper. Here the pages came apart. Heaven be praised. It was only a laboratory they shared. And she also was very disrespectful in letters she wrote to the Home Secretary in protest. The subject of the book exists as a fact among the many other facts of life. The novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention it by Sir W. Johnson Hicks. May they mention it incidentally, although it's forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to or ascribed to subsidiary characters. Perhaps the Home Secretary will issue further orders on this point. So despite her scorn for this censorship, although it was a book she didn't write particularly highly, as a publisher Virginia Woolf would have had to take it into consideration in 1936. So it's an important element of the immediate context. So Orlando, surely the greatest modernist queer text, which also published in 1928, it didn't suffer the same fate, ironically, because arguably it's more explicit than the well. But as the literary fantasy, rather than a middlebrow romantic novel, it wasn't perceived as a threat to social order in the same way. And also I think it's not in so much that it's coded, but that it's so multifaceted and corresponding that it would be very difficult to pin it down to a legal definition of obscenity. I also suspect that the establishment might consider that anyone who could read a book like that was probably lost to conventional morality anyway. Certainly one possibility I feel. And I think that in the chase of the wild goose, the influence of Orlando is evident in many ways. The riff on the concepts of history and biography of time itself, and perhaps even the title and the wild goose appears on the last page of Orlando, of course. And the ladies themselves were part of the inspiration for Orlando. In her journal of the 14th of March 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote that she was imagining a fantastical novel to be called the Jessamy Brides on the laders of Blangothlin. Saphism is to be suggested satire and wildness. And she later wrote in the margin, Orlando, leading to the waves. So in 1927 the ladies were already a shorthand for Wolf and a catalyst for her imagination. And during the 20s extracts from the diary had been published in Arthur Ponsonby's English diary anthologies. And of course Virginia Woolf would have known all about the 19th century fan base for them and words with sonnets and other references from earlier eras. But the publication of the Hamwood papers in 1930 really brought the ladies into the modern age. I got a nice first edition of it here. I don't know if you'll be able to see it. But you can see it's a it's a damn fat book. And it was published by Macmillan. So quite mainstream. And it was edited by Mrs. G. H. Bell. And it tells the story of the ladies in a mix of letters and diaries, other diaries from the period, lots of extract and the butler's diary and a linking narrative. And this text really brought the ladies into the contemporary consciousness. And I can see inspired Mary Gordon as much by what she disliked about it, I think, as what she discovered from it. But in this way, the ladies even crossed the channel. Collette wrote a chapter about them in her 1932 book say pleasure. It wasn't actually published in English until 1968 as the pure and the impure. In 1932 asked and list as all important question was the relationship platonic and decided like her probably not. But Collette's work in English in the 30s is relevant to this, because the Claudine books were being translated, and including the lesbian episodes, and also proofs in search of lost time was available in 1932 with its eccentric exploration of Gomorrah. But these didn't fall found the senses, either because they just thought the French are like that, or because they were perceived as again, perhaps too literary to threaten the fabric of society. Close to home, Sylvia Townsend Warner, another modernist writer to whom the ladies were very important. In 1930, she told her lover to be Valentine Ackland, that when they shared a cottage together they would be like the ladies of land Goslin, which I think was a very clear message as to what she was hoping and expecting their relationship would be like. And then in 1932 Sylvia's mother gave her an antique China pomade pot. And it was decorated with those things you were mentioning Alison like, like these fan things, and it was decorated with the ladies walking out in their top hats. And so does mother said, I thought you and miss Ackland would like this, which Sylvia interpreters a spirited and affable little dig in our ribs. Which I think shows that the ladies were now in the 30s sort of general shorthand for a lesbian relationship, not merely a romantic friendship or a shared cottage. And in 1936, Warner wrote a novel, Summer Will Show, which was described by Valentine Ackland as her lesbian novel. And it describes the intense, very close relationship which develops between Sophia Willoughby and her husband's mistress, Minna Lemuel, in 1848 Revolutionary Paris. But although the two women's love, obviously is lesbian to today's reader, it's full of implicit sexuality. The novel avoids anything explicit. And it's a political novel, feminist, communist, definitely queer. But as a historical novel, like chase the wild goose, perhaps it avoided being read in that way. And in 1994, Ackland and Warner published Whether a Dove or Seagull, which was a book of joint poems that they'd both written to each other. And some of these are really explicit, they love poems between two women which would have surely very much displeased the Home Secretary. But perhaps the publishers were relying on the fact that, like Orlando, this poetry would be incomprehensible to the authorities. And as it turned out, most critics and readers presumed that Valentine was a man with that name, which slightly ignores the internal evidence of the erotic poems, which I think is another example of lesbian invisibility, even if the author's intent was to be seen. Also in 1936, same year, Juna Barnes's Nightwood was published by Faber, which is another high modernist text, often described as a work of genius, greatly admired by its original editor, T.S. Eliot, and now recognises a major lesbian text. And perhaps, again, the relative safety of lyricism and obscurity might have emboldened the publishers. But apparently, T.S. Eliot did tone down some of the lesbian episodes in order to avoid possible censorship. But what's left is something much more overt than anything in the well. It tells the story of the doomed love affair of Nora Flood and Robin Voate in 1920s Paris, which was based on Juna Barnes' obsessional love for the alcoholic sculptor Thelma Wood. Barnes was also called the author of Lady Zolmanac, again 1928, which was quite a year. And that's the lesbian satire, which features Radcliffe Hall among many other contemporary lesbians. But being produced in Paris in a small edition, Juna Barnes actually sold it on the street like a pamphlet. It may not have registered with most English readers in the 1930s in the context of Chase, but it was a cult hit. I just briefly mentioned a couple of other texts of the same period. The early Keynes, 1934 novel devoted ladies, has the same stock characters, the wicked mannished lesbian Jessica and her victim lover, Jane. And Daphne de Mariette, Rebecca in 1938. The sinister housekeeping Mrs. Danvers is a sort of lesbian by implication, which everybody remembers a bit in the film with the creepy bit where she's fingering Rebecca's underwear. And finally, I think we must mention Vita, Sackville West, not only the inspiration for Orlando, but a lesbian also herself, of course. Her poetry book King's Daughter, 1929, according to her husband, had unwisely lesbian poems in it for that year of censorship. The way her novels are on lesbian themes, but they're often disguised by gender switching. She usually represents herself as the male character. But The Dark Island, 1934, also published by the Hurgoth Press, is interesting because it's a popular melodrama, contemporary melodrama, like the well, and it contains a relationship between two women, which certainly looks queer to us. But perhaps it was safe from official sanction because they die at the end, which is an outcome that was to become very familiar to readers of lesbian fiction in later decades. So in this context, the Chase the Wild Goose is an interesting crossover, because the first part could be read as a sort of queer version of a fairly typical romantic historical novel of the period, which is sort of avoids the dangers of explicit eroticism, but it emphasizes the love. So it's brave, but at the same time it's publishable and careful in a way. But in the last section, where the ladies meet the author in that extraordinary moment of time traveling, traveling biography. It's a surprising escape into the fantastical world of literary weirdness, and it takes a lot more risks. And I think perhaps that's what made the book of interest to Virginia Woolf and the Hurgoth Press. Thank you very much. That's fascinating. I mean, that whole period, the first few decades of the 20th century is just fascinating in relation to lesbian history. I'm picking up on the whole language thing. I mean, through our history language used to describe LGBTQ plus people has been disguised, and we have to read between the lines. So how does Gordon handle this in Chase the Wild Goose and DM, can we start with you. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think with the book itself, I think it's just, I don't, I don't think she shies away from the fact that they were maybe not necessarily sexual lovers, but they had a very strong, they had a romantic life together. So I think she doesn't necessarily, she doesn't disguise anything. I think she's very confident in her portrayal of their relationship. She's very clear, certainly in the final part of the book in saying that she sees them as foremothers, you know, you paved the way for us for the people who came afterwards, you know, you are our foremothers. So I think she's quite explicit in that sense of saying that, you know, because they existed, we can exist. I think she doesn't use, in fact, she pushes back against the terminology, the kind of the sex logical terminology of the day, and refuses it. But I think she's very clear that she is claiming them for her generation in the present. So I think Alison, though, I think Alison could perhaps talk a bit more about the historical terminology in a more eloquent way, I think. Not to pass the baton too quickly. I'm kind of interested in the way that Mary Gordon. Well, I mean, clearly it was wise to sit on the fence as it were, but she is, I think, genuine, you know, she really, really is quite ambiguous about the nature of their relationship. And as you say, DM, she explicitly kind of places them outside of the sex logical idea of inversion, because at one point she describes how their family friends and Miss Goddard, who had described Miss Butler as having a debauched mind, this is when the two women were trying to run away together. And that later on Miss Goddard forgot that Miss Butler had a debauched mind and defended her by maintaining the romantic friendship theory, which is obviously what Mary Gordon is wanting to do in the book. And Gordon goes on and since no terrible scientific names were in existence to describe the phenomena of the kind, the escapade remains romantic. So I think she's explicitly kind of placing the ladies outside of, well, yeah, kind of have a localist sexological view of them as being categorized in a particular way as inverts, which was the contemporary name for lesbians, you know, lesbian was sort of coming in, coming in as a terminology and the, well, amongst some groups of people anyway in the 30s and 40s. But at the same time, yeah, as you say she, she casts it as a kind of, as she casts them as spiritual forerunners so she talks about them as, as kind of having. them as being in the spiritual company or of many unknown women entirely unconscious pioneers into another epoch. So she's kind of drawing on other psychological ideas which is the Jungian stuff in seeing them as these sort of spiritual forerunners and as really important to women same sex love and kind of still leaving it open I think as you know is it love or is it sexual or is it all of those things. And what I find interesting about Mary Gordon is on the one hand yes she's tried to negotiate the 1930s. And all the stuff that's coming down the line and more explicit discussion of, of homosexuality but she's also herself. She was a woman in the late 19th century sense she trained she was one of the early women doctors she fought hard she struggled with her family to get educated and trained as a doctor and then she was the first woman as a prison inspector of women's and women inmates. And, and she was also a suffragist. So she was, you know incredibly a kind of aligned her at her own life with with a struggle for women's emancipation and of course, as a young woman in the late 19th century and early 20th century, she was involved in all those networks of suffragists and new women. She was a woman who had relationships with other women. And some of them, certainly by the suffrage period, we know they were sexual relationships that others were were not. Oh she was also she also worked the Scottish women's hospital didn't she in the ambulance service in the first world war. And again that was a kind of full of a network of of women who were identified as, you know, enjoying same sex love and as, you know, not seeing heterosexual marriages at all important to them so she comes out of that period of time. But yeah she's moving into the 20s and 30s and, and as a doctor is all kind of a well aware of all these different strands of of psychological medical and psychological thinking and it's, you know, trying to steer a course between all those I think. Francis, can I just read a bit from the book though just to give the audience a flavor of just the, the kind of the tone of the book in case they haven't read it just the bit where, if you don't mind Francis. When Sarah first kind of cut gets her eyes on when she first sees Eleanor the kind of the meat cute of the book, because it gives you a sense of how Gordon's figuring this this queer gaze this this queer identity circulating this queer identification between between women and and celebrating it in in quite a sweet playful joyful way. So this is Sarah seeing Eleanor. She went to the window to look outside, but drew back as she saw a young woman crossing the lawn in the direction of the entrance door. She looked after the young woman with curiosity. She was hapless. She had a rosy face, blue eyes and fair thick hair which curled like her own. She was strong and active. She wore unusual shoes, thick and square such as boys wore. She was smiling and talking to an enthusiastic enthusiastic puppy which had rushed to greet her than the glimpse of her was gone. And then a bit later. Eleanor enters the room to find Sarah. And she says, I'm very glad to see Miss Ponzi be replied Eleanor. If I had known she was to be here I shouldn't have gone out. She took Sarah's hand in a warm firm class and smiled sincerely into her eyes. In her soft Irish voice she spoke again. No question but that we shall be friends. We are friends already, said Eleanor Butler. Where Sarah asked herself was this eccentric handful that was Miss Butler. She could never have existed. This woman was charming, gracious, kind. Sarah smiled did not fall off this time but in speechless response to the other words she flushed delicately all over her pale face. So, I mean, I appreciate it's kind of, it's romantic. It's very vanilla. It's very sweet. But I think it gives you a sense of the first half of the book anyway of how Mary Gordon is figuring their relationship. Thank you very much. Francis. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's true. And I completely agree with you that it that it comes across as very much like a romantic historical novel. And as you say, it's kind of quite sweet and quite and quite soft. But I also do agree with us and that there is a kind of part of the reading between the lines thing is that is that she's she doesn't really go in for that to talk very much about it, although she says she calls it ardent love. There isn't anything explicit. And I also thought it was interesting that quite a lot of the time she she seems to be defending them against imputations of scandal and, you know, the debauched mind thing. And, and I felt that that was an interesting paradox that what is she defending them against the suggestions that they're lesbians while they are lesbians apparently so what's the problem. You know, they'll seem to. I think that is part of the, as you say that the fact that you have to read between the lines. I also thought it was quite interesting that the bit at the end when they're having a discussion and she's telling them all about women don't have to marry now. And there are these marvelous new ways they don't have to have lots of children even if they have married and ladies are all very interested in all of that. But then, at the, at the very, very end. When it's Sarah Puntingby I think says to her, and you have you know one. And she says to call me beloved to go with me. No one. I thank you for your sweet concern. One was not quarrel with one's own share of the price of our freedom. And that sounds, that's very new woman isn't it it's it's it's that she's made these sacrifices so that she can be a doctor, a prison inspector have an independent life. So she might obviously feel that she couldn't have married at the time of her youth and and had that sort of life. But again she she doesn't have a woman who's her significant other in whatever whatever way her love or her partner does she in the book. Alison you're about to say something interesting because it's bursting out of you. Well it is interesting that isn't it because she's certainly aligning herself with the vision of the ladies as you know this impossible or very difficult to obtain ongoing love relationship, which you know she and many other women aspire to. And she's kind of. Yeah, I mean I should say I think she's, she's seeing she's seeing she's kind of evoking this notion of the new woman or the suffrage feminist who, and you know, they, they kind of try to elevate spinster hoods away from the idea of sort of something lost or never, you know, you know, of marriage having, you know, been having not managed to get married into something But I mean within that was often a lot, you know, quite a widespread experience of love between women and we don't. I mean we have we have these sort of snippets of Mary Gordon's life but it does seem that she did have in the past in her past, a relationship with a woman which had broken up in around 1922 which she regretted the breakup. I mean in 1922 I mean Mary Gordon herself was about 60 so and you know when she see visits the ladies as ghosts she's in her mid 70s. So we got, we have these sort of snippets from letters between her and other women doctor friends. So it seems there was somebody who may have been a partner I mean I wouldn't want to sort of say it more strongly than that who was nicknamed a woman who was nicknamed Frank. And, you know, Frank and she had clearly had some separation, which was, you know, quite painful. Some years earlier, which had been discussing with her another woman friend who knew them so. So it's a kind of lost love narrative but we don't really. Again, it's, you know, we can only read that between the lines because she paid places so much store by the fact that the latest relationship lasted for over decades and decades. And, yeah, that they were icons not just as lesbians but as this lesbian couple, or at least as a couple who whose love had persisted. Thank you. It is absolutely fascinating how she she writes about them. And certainly at the end she seems to ally very much with them because she says, Eleanor starts when she sees her because she she sort of thinks she looks like Sarah. Very quickly, because we kind of getting running a little bit out of time. And those of you who want to put questions in, we're about to go to quite a Q&A so please do put your questions in the box below, but just very quickly. So this is the last chapter in Chester Wilde Goose. Gordon was very interested in spiritualism and mediums and it's reflected in that last chapter when she meets the ghost. Some like that chapter others don't do you like that that particular part. Yeah, absolutely love it. I mean I think it's, it's amazing, like going into the fourth dimension, which is the kind of classic. And from what I understand the kind of 1920s 1930s kind of spiritual reference to kind of queer alternative time spaces where you can time travel or travel somewhere where you can interact with with queer life in a in a seamless way and connect with the four possibilities of, of different kinds of queer existences. It's, it's an amazing it's a remarkable piece of writing the first time I read it. I couldn't quite believe it. I've read it countless times now and I'm still, I still struggle to to make sense of it. Just because she plays it so straight. She is completely artless in some respect it's so literal, but it's so artful. And it's like it's artlessness, totally masks the fact that she's, you know she's talking about a dream it's a dream she actually says I'm, it's not really a ghost. I think that's the connection to the young, the young in connection because she had been studying with Carl and Emma Young and the book is dedicated to Emma young, young, sorry. And, and, yeah, so she says you know that once I took this this dream took me to to plus now to land for Glenn Goughlin. So she states very explicitly that it is a dream, but because it's played so straight it's so literal. You almost miss it, I think, and it seems she's so serious and she recounts this experience of going for a walk on this, this bright clear and, and sees the ladies. And again as you're saying in the likeness of Sarah, Ponsonby, Eleanor sees her as the likeness of Sarah. And, yeah, I just, I just love it and I think it's, it's so, it's so progressive and kind of resonates with a lot of contemporary queer thinking around about time travel and temporality. So it's, it's, it's very contemporary and I think it's, it's a piece of writing that that really I think people will connect with and deserves to be widely read I think the main body of the book deserves to be widely read because it's, it's just a really nice rendering of a lovely story. I think the end part just gives it a whole, a whole new level so yeah big fan of the end. Thank you very much Francis your thoughts. I thought it was great as well I mean I actually thought that it's, it transforms the book into as you say a rather simple and straightforward retelling of the story, you know, fictionalized into something altogether weirder and stranger. And I thought that it was an interesting commentary on the nature of biography, the way the biographer imagines the people until they become so real to them that they can actually speak to them, meet them. And the idea that it's a sort of two way traffic. And the biographer can do something for those people in, as well as the other way round. I was so very much like the connection with frankly Paul because of course she was a notorious spiritualist. She sued one of the committee from the Society of Psychological Research for libel, and one, because they basically called her a lesbian, which I think is quite funny. This happened before the well I've laid in this trial. And she was a huge believer which I'm sure Gordon must have known and published a paper on her own experiences with the medium getting elaborate messages from her dead lover Mabel Batten and Terry Castle in her brilliant book, Kindred Spirits, suggests that Neal Coward's friendship with Radcliffe Hall actually inspired his play Blythe Spirit. And that Madame Arcarty the medium is a not very coded lesbian. And I felt that had a very strong connection with all of this spiritualism dream world and and the querying of that whole big spiritualist fashion during the 20s and 30s. So I thought it was great. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's interesting when I read rereads the book, it's, it seems that in places Mary Gordon is also representing Sarah Ponson be as a bit of a mystic that she's, she she's kind of slightly otherworldly in various respects. And she's when she meets the ladies again as ghosts. She talks about them dreaming us into existence, and then she's dreaming of them. So, you know, I mean, I suppose if we're sort of trying to look at factual history then we wouldn't have much truck with ghosts but you know I really love the notion of queer heritage and whenever we're in a building or a place that has so many layers of queer history, you know we're imagining the LGBTQ people who've lived there in the past. So we are bringing them into our present day lives if not quite so imaginatively or materially almost as Mary Gordon does when she really meets the ladies and then you know has this arrangement to meet them again in the house. In the next day. So I think it kind of, yeah, for me it really resonates with the idea of queer heritage that you know we're constantly ourselves creating ghosts and ideas of the past. And that's, you know, that's true of us as historians and we should acknowledge that. Yeah, you know we're contributing to that to that as well so. Yeah, I think, you know, imagining our forerunners as as both like ourselves but also as very different you know she has to bring them up to speed with women's emancipation is is really, really amazing. So I yeah I like the ending I think there's a lot of a lot of mileage in it. Yeah, I agree with you and also I mean the changes that have gone through the plus now with itself. I mean the black and white building that we're also familiar with now was not the one they lived in so that there's you know this whole sort of sort of echoes from the past in that as well. So please do put your questions so I've got a question from Caroline. Please what is the origin and significance of the significance of the Mary Gordon title chase of the wild goose. How does it relate to the real life story of the ladies of Longotland. I'm intrigued to try and uncover any relation between the ladies and the reference to the wild goose made in the earlier Virginia wolf novel Orlando and I think we covered Francis I think you covered that slightly. Anything on that please. Yeah, the it's the it's on the last page of Orlando and the the wild goose. The wild goose feather falls. So somebody now grown a fine sea captain hail fresh colored and alert left to the ground that sprung up over his head, a single wild bird. It is the goose Orlando cried the wild goose. And the 12th stroke of midnight sounded the 12th stroke of midnight Thursday the 11th of October 1928. The last words of Orlando. The last words of the wild goose is somewhat mystical. And I think it connects to the idea of creativity. It's interesting bounce on Ackland. When she talked about the inspiration behind poems would say that it was a feather from a bird that had fallen, which which she caught, and it became a poem. And that connects with that. But somebody was talking about the title somebody else recently who told me that there's a very famous Irish patriotic ballad. Now this isn't my specialization, which is called the chase of the elves killed there, who were also known as the wild geese. So I don't know if anybody else knows more about that than I do but I think that may be a connection as well. And also a reference to a horse race, where the chase of the wild goose the wild goose was supposed to be the leader of the horseway race that was very erratic, and you had to try and follow the leader. DM, can you can you shed any more light on the title. No, I don't think so but I mean I always thought it connected to the sense of flight as well that they were on a journey that the ladies were on a journey that they were escaping from their, from their homeland into to to clang Auckland so I think it. You know that they were taking flight and, you know, flying off somewhere so I think, I think it's, I think that the connection to Orlando is is probably very deliberate. It's where where Orlando ends. This is where the story is picked up. So I don't, you know, it was published by Hogarth Press, I don't think it's any coincidence that she is Mary Gordon use that imagery in in the title. Yeah, but it's an odd, but it's odd in a way isn't it because a wild goose chase is chasing after something illusory. Yeah, well yeah successful you know. But isn't that yeah isn't that the sense of the queer history the elusiveness of it as well I think maybe that we're chasing it she's you know she's chasing it she's trying to find it. And the thing about the ending just to go back to the ending is actually very sad because you get the sense of Mary Gordon being alone. And maybe that's the narrator rather than Mary Gordon being alone because there's also the bust that was created in her likeness with them. I don't know what their relationship was, but she, yeah, that that seemed there's quite a sort of putting yourself in in the church in Kangoklin this bust of Belaser Kangoklin in Mary Gordon and Violet, putting yourself in stone with another woman in the place of Sarah and Eleanor, it seems a very strong gesture in the church, you know, let's go in the church. So that's the it's a remark and that's that the the the stone buster actually is the poster for this event. So yeah so I'm not sure what their relationship was but yeah I think you do get the sense that the end of her life she's, she's dealing with all of all of that business all of that this is part of her, the business that she's dealing with telling this story. There's a, there's a sense of indebtedness and of being alone, and I think, you know, to have the conviction and, you know, probably the obsession really to do all that research to tell that history. I think maybe it was a, a world goose chase for her as well and it, you know, following all the leads and all the stories so yeah but I think most likely the Orlando connection is a very tangible, tangible one. Do you know about the sculpture Norina? I do yes yes I mean some people have said that when you study the faces they do have more resemblance to Mary Gordon but there are not any images of violence so we don't know what she looked like. But yeah certainly a lot of people have said that the resemblance is more to Mary Gordon and violence. Alison any thoughts on the title? No I don't have anything to add to my. How accurate is Gordon's account of their escape? Do you want to start? Maybe Alison as the historian should answer this one, dealing with the accuracy. Well I probably can't give you a very precise answer on that. I think some of it, I mean as I understand it she drew on the Hamwood papers which are actual letters. Of, from the Ponsonby family, or no maybe, yeah. And I think, you know, Elizabeth Maver's original book about the ladies which was published in the 1970s and has since been reprinted is probably, you know, is certainly a kind of usefully accurate account of their history. I mean my feeling is that she, you know, some of it was accurate but she embellished such a lot of it. And some of it is taken verbatim from letters and other bits of it are, you know, made up to become, yeah, a kind of a romance. And also, I mean just to sort of pick up on something we were discussing, you know, a few minutes ago, there's a bit in it isn't there where I think again Miss Goddard who kind of is, you know, good guy and bad guy some of the time. When she's kind of trying to warn Sarah off Eleanor says something to her and I'm paraphrasing here because I've got the book in front of me. So Gordon has her say to Sarah. Oh well, you know she what happens if you go away together anything might happen why she might even make love to you. And Sarah said something like, oh well that would be smiles and said oh that would be rather wonderful or what's that effect. You know, she's kind of put it she's she's I suppose she's illuminating the history. Some of that some of its factual and some of it is not but she's illuminating the facts with with with emotional feeling and her imagine imaginative notion of what she would have had them say and feel and do. I mean a lot of it also is written in contemporary language language of the 20s and 30s or possibly even language of Mary Gordon's youth you know some of it kind of recalls them all being at, as if they were kind of undergraduates that's in a university coffee parties and stuff so it's. Yeah, it switches between these different kinds of different tones. So I wouldn't take it as historically accurate if I think if you want an accurate version of the elopement then I think you know look at maybes account which is based on a range of sources. But you know it's it's it's not completely you know it is based on the facts the fact that you know they got away the second time and there are these negotiations with the family of which of course nobody can know what was actually said in rooms between Sarah and her guardians and her and so on so yeah. And of course maybe would have had access to money more sources than than Gordon in the 1930s. Yes, she did and you know she did some some some good research into into those sources and just to say that the Tracy spotty would spot us words made a fantastic short film called and when Sally jumped out the window which is a short film about the escape of the ladies clang of you know Sarah and Eleanor and it's a really brilliant rendering of that of that story and it's yeah I think it's such a rich, a rich seem to to explore. I think yeah I'm amazed that more people haven't explored this this narrative because that the escape in itself is just an extraordinary thing to have happened. There's lots of people later on wrote books about about about them which also made up lots of stories about the elopement. Yeah the jumping over walls breaking legs and things which were not true but I mean, all of these sources kind of have made the myth of the ladies and the, and kind of have has appointed the normative what they did you know to extremely well born young, youngish women eloping together which was pretty amazing in the late 18th century. They certainly deserves a feature film yes, or TV series like Anastom. Francis, did you want to add anything. Yeah I was just thinking about the authenticity that I think it says in the very interesting afterwards of the book that Leonard Wolf was a little bit concerned about was it fiction or was it a biography how factual was it. And that Mary Gordon sort of made clear that it was based on fact, but that she'd I think she says she added in some poetry. It's just her way of saying she'd sort of fictionalize the conversation as you say in a slightly, slightly, and it's not really it's not 18th century pastiche at all is it it's much more, much more 30s style. I thought it was quite interesting because again, as in that she wants to defend their honor. She also seems to almost want to suggest that the most exciting aspects of the, of the running away of the elopement. The pistol the being dressed in men's clothes and so on, but that she doesn't really use that all that much. She's kind of toning down the gentleman jack part of it, because it's a bit un-ladylike, and she doesn't, and she talks about the scandal and rumour and says there were lots of untrue stories about it. And I think it's rather sweet really it's not very, it's not very commercially minded is it to sort of try and, you know, super up as much as she can she's doing the opposite and being like oh no no no it was all agreed and they went nicely and got a bit of a cold perhaps but you know that's as far as it went. Sorry, part of the outrage though of the book, and I think part of the impetus of her writing it was to write against the hand with papers wasn't it. Yeah, I think she was trying to present a counter representation that was more that centered their agency and their decision to elope together so I think that's, I think that's part of the, the narrative that she was pushing back against in the book to try and, you know, tell the story, as they would have said it. And perhaps that's what the end part of the novel is about as well with trying to revive that voice. I think we're coming to the end of our time. Go on chatting all evening there's so many things that I wanted to have her and chat about further but sadly we have come to the end, so that just leaves me to say thank you very much to our three speakers who were brilliant. Alison Orham and Francis Bingham. Thank you very much indeed. I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope we do another one very soon, and by the book by the book.