The Secret Diaries Of Miss Anne Lister: Vol. 1: I Know My Own Heart (Virago Modern Classics)

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BBC Two announces brand new drama: The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister". BBC Press Office. BBC. 11 November 2009 . Retrieved 1 February 2010. She herself suggested a kiss,” Anne later wrote. “I thought it dangerous and would have declined but she persisted.” These diaries, written primarily between 1817 up until Lister’s death in 1840, are partly in code to hide her lesbian sexuality. Once decoded, they are perfectly unambiguous, at least today.

Anne was born in 1791 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, a region that had accumulated wealth by the 1800sthanks tothe industrial revolution. Born to a British military officer Jeremy Lister and a woman called Rebecca Battle, Anne was later raised in Shibden Hall, a fifteenth-century Tudor manor that belonged to the Lister family for over two centuries. The marriage was not plain sailing. The women were completely different characters - Anne assertively ruled her estate and became embroiled in local politics while her new wife often felt neglected, suffering regular bouts of sadness.

Shibden Hall

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. Anne Lister (3 April 1791 – 22 September 1840) was an English diarist, famous for revelations for which she was dubbed "the first modern lesbian". a b c "The Shibden Hall Estate". Leeds Times. 22 July 1882 . Retrieved 5 February 2015– via British Newspaper Archive.

Hughes, Patricia, The Secret Life of Miss Anne Lister and the Curious Tale of Miss Eliza Raine. (Hues Books Ltd 2010) Anne Lister was the second child and eldest daughter of Captain Jeremy Lister (1753–1836) who, as a young man in 1775, served with the British 10th Regiment of Foot in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American War of Independence. [1] In August 1788, he married Rebecca Battle (1770–1817) of Welton in East Riding, Yorkshire. Their first child, John, was born in 1789 but died the same year. Anne Lister was born in Halifax on 3 April 1791. In 1793, the family moved to an estate named Skelfler House at Market Weighton. Skelfler was where young Anne spent her earliest years. A second son, Samuel, who was close to Anne, was born in 1793. [2] The Listers had four sons and three [a] daughters, but only Anne and her younger sister, Marian (born 13 October 1798), survived past 20 years old. [1] 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. I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.' – 29th January 1821 There was no blueprint for what she was doing, she was just being herself. As you’re playing her, you just become aware that you have a right to be a person, you have a right to be who you are.”I owe a good deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past & present & thus to cheer & edify the future. (22nd June 1821) Stories of Independent Women from 17th-20th Century: Genteel Women Who Did Not Marry. Charlotte Furness, 2020, Pen and Sword History . See chapter "Anne Lister of Shibden Hall 1791-1840". Clark, Anna (July 1996). "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity". Journal of the History of Sexuality. 7 (1): 35. PMID 11613422. It was while studying at a boarding school in the fashionable city of York that Lister started keeping a diary, in which she recorded an intimate relationship with another female student. During her time at the school, Lister was also introduced to a monied, cosmopolitan social circle, which sparked a sense of dissatisfaction with her own position as a member of the moderately wealthy rural gentry. She aspired to heightened status and wealth—qualities that she would eventually seek in a “wife.” Liddington, Jill, Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833–36. (Rivers Oram Press, 1998)

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. Trigg, W.B. (1943). Miss Wadsworth's Diary. West Yorkshire Archive Service: Halifax Antiquarian Society. p.123.She inherited Shibden Hall, Halifax from her uncle and massively improved it, managing its farms with great efficiency. It was at Shibden that she met Ann Walker whom she would ‘marry’. The book recounts the affairs that she had up to meeting heiress Ann in 1832; her most passionate affair prior to this was to Mariana Belcombe who broke Anne’s heart when she married Charles Lawton. The relationship between Anne and Ann was a strange one in some ways as for the first two years of the relationship Ann would not commit to them being together and to AL’s frustration frequently prevaricated. Their relationship became sexual and this was described in the dairies. AL felt that Ann was far more sexually aware than she ever let on and certainly wasn’t an innocent. It emerged later that she had some form of affair with Reverend Ainsworth. One-sixth of Anne’s diaries are written in a code, devised by herself, based on a combination of algebra and the Greek alphabet, to which Anne referred as her ‘crypthand.’ As you would guess, the coded portions contained some of the more—ahem—steamy encounters with the women she admired. Anne was convinced that no-one would ever be able to decode her crypthand, and her secret encounters were recorded for her enjoyment alone. She was wrong. Anne Lister reveals her true feelings nine months later: 30 August 1823 “Mrs Taylor’s sketch of me, like a person afraid of speaking. Too foolish looking. Could not bear it. Not at all characteristic.” 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.

Liddington, Jill (1993). "Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax (1791–1840): Her Diaries and the Historians". History Workshop Journal. 35 (35): 45–77. doi: 10.1093/hwj/35.1.45.

Wednesday 20 November [Halifax] At 12:40, too George in the gig & drove to Mrs Taylor’s. Sat for my likeness perhaps 1 1/4 hour. Very well satisfied with the sketch. There is something so very characteristic in the figure. Paid for it, 2 guineas … Neither Mrs Rawson nor Catherine thought it a good likeness. Found great fault with the mouth &, at first, with almost every part of the whole thing.