Description
Republishing Mary Gordon’s Chase of the Wild Goose – a forgotten classic queer novel celebrating the Ladies of Llangollen
Mary Gordon’s historical fiction about the Ladies of Llangollen, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1936, is the forgotten queer novel of the interwar era – an amiable companion to Woolf’s time-travelling Orlando and joyful antidote to the misery of The Well of Loneliness.
Out of print since the 1940s, Chase of the Wild Goose has just been republished by Lurid Editions, making the book available to contemporary readers for the first time.
At the heart of Chase of the Wild Goose are the lives of Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1832), two Irish women who eloped from their families and set up home in Llangollen, North Wales. In their lifetimes they became famous celebrities, known internationally as the Ladies of Llangollen.
Join lesbian modernist expert Elizabeth English, Art Historian Dr Freya Gowrley and Victorian literary scholar Tara Puri and publisher D-M Withers to discuss a book described by Sarah Waters as a ‘fascinating piece of queer literary history.’ .
Elizabeth English is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University and author of Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction
Dr Freya Gowrley is Lecturer in History of Art/Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. She specialises in art and objects from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century, with a focus on domestic spaces.
Tari Puri is the Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Bristol. She is currently finishing a book on Victorian women’s writing, dress and material culture more broadly. She also researches Indian women’s magazines from the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, focusing on questions of work, education and subjectivity. In 2016, she co-authored a book with Benoît Dillet on contemporary art and politics, titled The Political Space of Art: The Dardenne Brothers, Arundhati Roy, Ai Weiwei and Burial.
D-M Withers is the Founder of Lurid Editions Ltd and Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Exeter.
Tickets are £5, which includes a glass of wine/ a soft drink and £2 off the book.
