Sat up lovemaking,” Anne wrote one evening after a night spent with Mariana. “She [asked me to swear] to be faithful, to consider myself as married. Anne’s diaries once again remained a secret for decades, until the fateful day when Helena Whitbread, who began her university studies at age 45, wandered into the archives at age 51, looking for a research project. She had no way of knowing at that time that she was about to uncover, by carefully decoding each and every one of Anne’s diaries, one of the most fascinating characters of the 19th century, one that has undoubtedly captured the imagination and admiration of today’s modern audience. Also, “the journals” (as opposed to selections) have not been published yet. The West Yorkshire Archives Service is in the proces of publishing the transcriptions online, volume by volume, and at the moment have got up to mid-1824. Anne Lister was a fascinating complicated person and this book presents her diaries and letters from the 1830s from when she met Ann Walker and when they were "married" ie season one of the show. This account firmly identifies Lister as a butch lesbian but doesn't mention that there is a lot of evidence of her gender nonconformity and that she didn't straightforwardly see herself as a woman, so that was disappointing. Butch lesbian is a totally valid interpretation of Lister from her writing but it doesn't feel right to pretend it's the only one.

Season One follows the return of Anne Lister to Shibden Hall, her determination to update the estate and manage its assets effectively and the beginnings of her romantic involvement with Ann Walker. Although this involvement has a happy end (and I'm not giving anything away here), the two women have to face the constant hostility of Ann Walker's family who are set upon crushing the spirits of these two women. Will they succeed? While being educated at home, Lister developed an interest in classical literature. In a surviving letter to her aunt from 3 February 1803, a young Lister explains "My library is my greatest pleasure... The Grecian History had pleased me much." [9] Shibden Hall, in 2010, with the library tower added by Anne Lister on the leftWhen she returned to Halifax several months later, Ann was waiting for her. She had turned down an offer of marriage from a man. It was the clearest message yet she was in favour of a life with Anne. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928. Martha Vicinus, 2004, University of Chicago Press . See chapter: "'A Scheme of Romantic Friendship': Love and Same-Sex Marriage", pp.18-28. In the early nineteenth century, it was rare for a young woman to be both unmarried and a landowner in her own right. It is likely that Lister was scrutinised for living so independently, as if she were a man rather than a respectable young woman. She would become an astute businesswoman and used her income to buy shares in the mining, stone, railway and canal industries.

Anne Lister was a number of things. She was, I quote, "the first modern lesbian". There is a plaque in Shibden Hall and another one outside the church where she had a secret (and obviously informal) wedding ceremony with Ann Walker whom she considered her wife. She was an entrepreneur with a head for (manageable) risk who competed with men on an equal basis. She refused to be patronised or sidelined by men. And she refused the advice of her girlfriends to find a man, become respectable in the eyes of society and do what she liked in secret. Anne Lister would have none of that. She knew what she wanted: she wanted a companion, a wife, with whom she would live together. She found that in nearby heiress Ann Walker. Work by Dorothy Thompson and Patricia Hughes in the late 1980s at Birmingham University's Department of Modern History resulted in translation of much of the code, as well as discovery of the first juvenile Lister diaries and decoding of the other two Lister codes. [ citation needed] Hughes self-published Anne Lister's Secret Diary for 1817 [54] (2019) and The Early Life of Miss Anne Lister and the Curious Tale of Miss Eliza Raine (2015), [55] both of which make extensive use of other materials in the Lister archives including letters, diaries, and ancillary documents. Fascinating! I don't know much about queer history or the important people within it, so I'd never heard of Anne Lister until the recent HBO series. This book only covers a few years of her life and focuses on her relationship with Ann Walker. In fact, the series follows it quite well with some added story-lines about the tenants and servants. That's not a surprise since it seems like Choma and Sally Wainwright (the series's writer/director) are friends and that this show was a long-time-coming passion project for Wainwright.She asked if I thought the thing was wrong – if it was forbidden in the bible & said she felt queer when she heard Sir Thomas Horton mentioned. I dexterously parried all these points – said Sir T. H.’s case was quite a different thing. That was positively forbidden & signally punished in the bible – that the other was certainly not named. Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (editors), 2006, Cambridge University Press . See chapter "The Byronic Woman: Anne Lister's Style, Sociability and Sexuality", pp. 186-210. Lister's diaries reveal much about contemporary life in West Yorkshire, including her development of historic Shibden Hall, and her interests in medicine, mathematics, landscaping, mining, railways, and canals. Many entries were written in code that was not decrypted until long after her death. These graphic portrayals of lesbian relationships were so frank that they were thought to be a hoax until their authenticity was confirmed. Music and Performance: Interview with O'Hooley and Tidow". When Sally Met Sally. 12 September 2012. Archived from the original on 17 September 2012 . Retrieved 15 September 2012. Revealing Anne Lister". BBC Two Programmes. BBC. Archived from the original on 4 June 2010 . Retrieved 10 June 2010.

Bray, Alan (2003). The Friend. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-07180-4 . Retrieved 3 August 2008. I would've loved knowing more about Ann Walker, too. I don't know what sort of documents exist in relation to her besides Anne's diary entries, so perhaps that's not possible. But I wanted to know more about her struggles with mental health and how she was seemingly able to overcome them (at least while Anne was alive). Just the fact that she had these issues that arose from pressure from her family regarding her fortune and her life as well as what I assume to be something akin to modern-day internalized homophobia is really intriguing to me, so I wanted to take a deep dive into her psyche, in a way. Because the language of the 19th Century didn’t encompass lesbianism “nobody could actually call her out on it, and if they’d got anywhere close to it Anne would have just run rings around them,” she said. Lister's diaries have been described as part of a "trilogy of early 19th century diaries" by local women, covering the same period from different perspectives, along with those of Caroline Walker from 1812 to 1830, and Elizabeth Wadsworth from 1817 to 1829. [47] In 2020, Ann Walker's own journal [48] was discovered. Although brief, covering June 1834 to February 1835, it covers a pivotal period that weaves through the corresponding narratives in Lister's diary. [49] Research [ edit ]

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Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing: Anne Lister's diaries are an indispensable read for anyone interested in the history of gender, sexuality, and the intimate lives of women.' - Sarah Waters During the series’ early phases, Choma would transcribe portions of Lister’s diaries and pass them along to Wainwright as fuel for the show’s script. Wainwright drew heavily on Lister’s writing, spinning her words into dialogue that would resonate with a contemporary audience. “I tried to find a voice that utilized a lot of the language in the journals, but still felt quite alive and fluid,” she says. To convey Lister’s unique energy and appearance, Wainwright and Jones also spent hours honing the character’s gait, voice and other physical mannerisms. The women had been acquaintances for several years. Walker was 12 years younger than Lister and, by all accounts, a whole lot shyer. In 1834, she finally accepted Lister’s persistent proposals to join her in a union that would be “the same as a marriage” (as Walker described it). We] decided Anne was somebody who invades other people’s personal space without realizing she's doing it,” Wainwright says as an example. “When she’s talking to them she just gets a bit too close because she’s so excited about what she’s talking about.”