"This book explores the lives and afterlives of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement rendered them pivotal figures in the history of female same-sex desire. Butler and Ponsonby's shared life--written, performed, and enacted in the everyday--embodied a form of queer celebrity constituted by their notably visible remoteness to erotic legibility. Their queerness further discloses the provisionality of the varied critical and political movements that have claimed them as ancestors in order to sustain their own subject positions"--Provided by publisher.