Elizabeth Mavor - Telegraph Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby were friends who, in 1778, fled from their native Ireland and set up home together in a slate-roofed cottage in the north Wales village of Llangollen . There, until their deaths in 1829 and 1831 respectively, they spent their days together, industriously gardening and improving their minds by reading the classics, studying languages and writing journals and letters. The subject of much gossip and romantic speculation, they became celebrities and their visitors included royalty, philanthropists, artists, writers and poets. The nature of their "romantic friendship" excited much curiosity over the years. They referred to each other as "My Beloved" or "My Better Half"; slept in the same bed and dressed like men with top hats and fitted jackets, their hair cut short . Most commentators nowadays assume they were lesbians, yet few who visited them thought they were and neither did Elizabeth Mavor. In her biography, she pointed out that the word "romantic" simply meant fanciful in the 18th century; that it was the fashion for friends to speak to each other in language people now reserve for sexual partners; that it was not uncommon to share a bed with a sister or a friend, and that the ladies" hairstyles and mannish hats followed a French fashion and were in any case practical for the country. The two women's friendship, she maintained, was a perfect union of souls - and no more: "Depending as they did upon time and leisure, they were aristocratic, they were idealistic, blissfully free, allowing for a dimension of sympathy between women that would not now be possible outside an avowedly lesbian connection. Indeed, much that we would now associate solely with a sexual attachment is contained in romantic friends: tenderness, loyalty, sensibility, shared beds, shared tastes, coquetry, even passion. The daughter of an engineer, Elizabeth Osborne Mavor was born in Glasgow on December 17 1927 and educated at St Leonards School, St Andrews, and at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she read Modern History and edited Cherwell. After graduation she worked for the magazine Argosy , wrote reviews for newspapers and began writing fiction. In her first novel, Summer in the Greenhouse (1959), an elderly woman tells the story of a youthful affair . She wrote several more novels, including A Green Equinox in which the heroine becomes involved in an affair with the married owner of a grand country estate, but ultimately forms deeper friendships with the other women in his life - his wife and mother. Elizabeth Mavor became interested in women like the Llangollen ladies not so much because of their ambiguous sexuality but because of their willingness to flout convention. In a similar vein, her The White Solitaire (1988) was a fictionalised account of the life of Mary Read, an 18th century woman who lived as a man, concealing her identity in her life as a soldier and sailor-turned-pirate. Elizabeth Mavor's other non-fiction works included editions of the American journals of the 19th century actress Fanny Kemble and Grand Tours of Katherine Wilmot: France 1801-3 and Russia 1805-7 (1992), the edited journals of an Irish socialite and traveller. A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen (1984) was an edited selection of entries from their journals, letters and account books. Her biographies included Virgin Mistress: a study in survival, an account of the life of Elizabeth Chudleigh, a pretty country maid with social aspirations who charmed the royal houses of Europe and became Duchess of Kingston, but was later tried for bigamy. In 1953 Elizabeth Mavor married the illustrator Haro Hodson, who survives her with their two sons. Elizabeth Mavor, born December 17 1927, died May 22 2013