Referring to Anne Lister as a force of
nature is accurate, but it’s also just a starting point.
Nature was certainly one of her passions:
The 19th-century Englishwoman dressed in stylish black clothes that resembled
men’s wear and spent hours walking through the countryside, visiting friends
and supervising workers at Shibden Hall, the Halifax, West Yorkshire estate she
inherited. Her forceful personality was also evident in the business world;
some of her acres were rich in coal, and she relished scrapping with the coal
titans of the 1830s as she tried to improve the estate’s fortunes.
But her
boldness was most evident in matters of love. Many of the 5 million-plus words
in Lister’s voluminous diaries, some of which were in code, chronicled her
relationships with a string of women she wooed, loved and bedded.
Lister’s complicated courtship with the
wealthy Ann Walker sits at the heart of “Gentleman Jack,” a historical drama
series premiering Monday on HBO (in a coproduction with the BBC) that was shot
on location at Shibden Hall. As a child, the show’s creator and writer Sally
Wainwright visited the historical site with her family — the house and its
grounds are now a public park — but she didn’t have a full picture of Lister’s
life for years. “People didn’t like talking about her,” Wainwright said.
She became
more deeply acquainted with Lister after coming across “Female Fortune,” a 1998
book on Lister by Jill Liddington, and has spent many hours reading and
decoding pages of Lister’s daily musings. “It’s not typed script, it’s
handwriting,” Wainwright said. “So few eyes may have actually been across any
particular piece of writing. To know that you might be the first person who’s
read [a section] — it’s very intimate.”
Wainwright funded the restoration and
digitization of the diary and said the West Yorkshire Archive Service is
working on a site that should make it accessible to the public later this
spring. The BAFTA-winner, best known to U.S. viewers for the Netflix cop drama
“Happy Valley,” has also penned the foreword to “Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne
Lister” by Anne Choma, a biographical portrait with extensive diary excerpts
that will be released April 30.
In a phone
interview last month, Wainwright — who also directed half of the eight episodes
of “Gentleman Jack” — discussed “Happy Valley,” Lister’s ambitions and finding
the perfect actress to play the “buccaneering” diarist. These are edited
excerpts from that conversation.
MR : You’ve done a number of projects —
“Happy Valley” in particular — focused on crime or police officers. Was
“Gentleman Jack” an intentional break from that?
SW : You
can easily get pigeonholed as somebody who writes police dramas, and as much as
I love the police dramas I’ve done, I wouldn’t want to get pigeonholed as
specifically doing that. I’m quite lucky in all the dramas I’ve done, they’ve
been quite different, from “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Happy Valley” and “To
Walk Invisible,” my film about the Brontë sisters.
MR :
It strikes me that Catherine Cawood from “Happy Valley” and Anne Lister
were both Yorkshire women who cared about their communities.
SW : With
Anne Lister it was slightly different, in that it was her estate and she had
about 25 tenants. So it was her world and she did refer to them as “my people,”
and she was very good to them. She could be hard on people — if they weren’t
pulling their weight she wouldn’t think twice about evicting them. But there
were people that did work hard and she looked after them. She often [paid for]
people’s kids to be educated. That’s different from Catherine, who had a beat
overseeing a massive landscape and was paid to do it. But she did care at quite
a deep level. It’s an interesting thought, that parallel.
MR : One thing that sets “Gentleman Jack” apart
from your earlier work is that, as Anne, the actress Suranne Jones occasionally
looks into the camera and addresses the viewer. Is that your way of re-creating
the intimacy of the diary?
SW :
Absolutely. I thought long and hard about [whether] we wanted her to
address the camera, because it’s something that a lot of people do now, with
varying degrees of success. So I was quite nervous about whether to do it or
not, and indeed, how to do it. We did it very sparingly, and we only did it
when we felt absolutely justified. But the thinking behind it was definitely
that [feeling] of intimacy with her audience. When you’re reading her most
intimate thoughts in the journal, it does feel like you’ve got a direct line to
her.
MR : Why
do you think she kept the diary?
SW :
She didn’t want to forget things, particularly in business. If she’d
done a deal with someone, she would make a record of everything down to the
last halfpenny. But I also think she was a compulsive writer. She took great
pleasure in actually putting it down in black and white and in recording her
relationships with other women, because then she could relive them.
MR :
She’s often direct and no-nonsense in daily life, but at certain
moments, she can be quite vulnerable and romantic.
SW : She’s a mass of contradictions. She
was very tough, but she also wore her heart on her sleeve in the journal. You
get a picture of a sensitive human being, someone who’s vulnerable to the
vagaries of love and passion, but who is able to take on the world and who
would not shy away from being quite conspicuous about who she was. And yet it’s
clear that she did feel things deeply when people offended her.
MR :
She’s also willing to get down into the dirt with her workers, but at
the same time, she believed in the class system.
SW : Absolutely. If she was a man, none of these
contradictions would be contradictions. She identified herself, really, with
men, and with a sort of masculine persona. So the idea of pursuing Ann Walker
[Sophie Rundle] for her money — that’s what landed men did then. They tried to
improve their lot by marrying well. At the same time, I don’t think she wanted
to be a man. I think she liked being a lesbian. I think she liked being a woman,
because it allowed her to be in intimate situations with women in a way that a
man in those days wouldn’t be allowed.
MR : She reminds me of those 18th century
Hogarth paintings — “A Rake’s Progress.” She’s a Regency rake and flirt at
times, isn’t she?
SW : That’s really true. Some of the press
already is describing her as Victorian, but she wasn’t. She died three years
after Victoria ascended the throne, so she’s very Regency. She was a real
player. She was very good at sex. It was high on her agenda of what was
important, and she was good at it.
MR : Did you have an idea of who you
wanted to play Anne for a long time?
SW :
I didn’t, to be honest. I couldn’t picture who could be Anne Lister.
There aren’t that many portraits of her, and all that exist are a little bit
cartoony. So I’ve never had a strong image of what she was like, and I needed
someone to come and show me what she was like, and Suranne did that. Right from
the word go, she really got it. Like Anne, she’s got a huge physical energy,
she’s got this mental energy, and she’s bold and robust in her thinking. She
will push things to the limit, and be willing to go into quite deep, dark
places. But she also got how Anne was very swashbuckling and buccaneering and
magnificent, really.
MR : You can see why people are drawn to
her. Every time Anne comes into a room, she’s so commanding.
SW :
She was very charismatic in real life. It’s clear from the journal that
people liked being with her and that she always had plenty to say. Women
probably did like her hugely because she gave them a sense of their own worth
somehow — that women could be like this. They didn’t have to be these little
bits of decoration. At the time, it was considered unladylike to be clever or
to show you were too clever. So I think women must have found her extremely
stimulating.
In ‘Gentleman Jack,’ Sally Wainwright
Brings a Fascinating Life From Diary to Screen. By Maureen Ryan. New York Times , April 18, 2019
When Halifax historian Helena Whitbread
was working on the diaries of Anne Lister, a 19th-century local landowner, in
the 1980s she was surprised to discover that some sections of the diaries were
written in code.
It turned out that once decoded, these
sections provided an astonishing source. They documented in detail, Lister’s
explicit sexual activities with a number of women, which culminated in her
“marriage” to Ann Walker in 1834 at Holy Trinity Church in York. Lister’s life
and exploits are currently being celebrated in an HBO/BBC drama starring
Suranne Jones in the title role.
While it is extraordinary to find material
which shatters traditional ideas and beliefs about 19th-century women and their
sexuality, there is more to Lister than her lesbianism. She was an astute
landowner, developer, mountaineer and politician. Her refusal to bow to public
conventions regarding her sexuality (she dressed in a “masculine” fashion,
celebrated her liaisons publicly, and was known locally as “Gentleman Jack”)
were equally relevant to other areas of her life, in particular her politics.
From an early age Lister had shown a
lively interest in current affairs, and she remained an active and committed
Tory all her life. But it was her succession to the Shibden Hall estate in
Halifax in 1826 that meant she had the money, power and influence to indulge
her passion for politics. The 1832 Reform Act provided the borough of Halifax
with two seats and from the outset was dominated by the local Liberal interest,
with radicals also having a foothold. Charles Wood, later Viscount Halifax,
first became MP in 1832 and remained the sitting member until 1865, first as a
Whig but later as a Liberal. For the Tory party, this was not fertile ground.
The scale of the task did not discourage
Lister and she set about building up a Conservative electorate in the town,
primarily by letting tenancies on her estate and that of Walker, to Tory
voters. Her diary explains her efforts in detail, relating conversations with
her tenants. For example:
“Told AG I did not want anyone to change his vote against his conscience
for me, but I had made up my mind to take none but blue tenants so long as
there remained people of this way of thinking; and when there were none I must
try to change myself.”
As properties from the Shibden estate came
to the end of their leases, Lister began to fill them with tenants who
supported her political persuasion. One example was the mortgaging and
subsequent letting of the Northgate Hotel in Halifax in 1835. This was an
opportune moment to increase the number of Tory votes she could control, and
that factor was clearly more important than the level of rental income that she
would receive.
In an interview with a prospective tenant,
she reduced the annual rent in return for the creation of seven Tory votes from
the tenant’s staff. She canvassed her tenants directly, touring her estate
during the run up to the elections, which ensured that they voted in support of
the Tory candidate who throughout the 1830s was James Stuart-Wortley, youngest
son of Baron Wharncliffe.
Lister was also involved in the more
disreputable side of electioneering and appeared to have no qualms about
threatening and carrying out evictions of tenants who refused to vote in
accordance with her wishes. Although she employed a steward, she undertook the
“persuasion” of her tenants herself.
She and her partner, Walker, refused to
renew the tenancies of a number of voters who refused to cooperate with their
political ambitions. Her diary for 1835, for example, related an encounter with
one of Walker’s tenants who refused to change his vote:
“We came away, she
determined to quit the people and I quite agreeing she was right.”
Her efforts were rewarded in 1835, when
the unthinkable happened and James Stuart-Wortley took one of the Halifax seats
by just one vote. Her energy and commitment to the creation of votes and
lobbying of tenants had turned a solidly Liberal borough into one where the
Tories had the potential to succeed.
The resulting wave of disappointment in
the town, especially among those with no vote, led to a riot resulting in
thousands of pounds worth of damage and several serious injuries. The following
day, Lister walked down into Halifax and was confronted by a mob of women and
boys:
“They
asked if I was yellow … they looked capable of pelting me. ‘Nay!’ said I, ‘I’m
black - I’m in mourning for the all the damage they have done’ - that seemed to
amuse them and I walked quietly and quickly past.”
Her bravery, then, was not merely in her
open acknowledgement of her sexuality but also in her determination to
establish a political interest which could include facing down a mob. Such
ambition may appear unremarkable for men of the period, but the accepted
narrative of the politics of 19th-century women, is to consider they had no
influence at all. The activities of Gentleman Jack demonstrate the need to
rewrite and reassess that perspective.
Gentleman Jack: a gripping 19th-century
tale of one woman’s bravery in sex and politics. By Sarah Richardson. The Conversation, May 13, 2019.
In
July 2018 the first blue plaque to be encircled by the LGBT+ rainbow was
unveiled at Holy Trinity church, Goodramgate, York. The plaque celebrates the
life of Anne Lister (1791-1840), a “gender-nonconforming entrepreneur”, and
commemorates the “marital commitment without legal recognition” that took place
between her and her lover Ann Walker in the church in 1834. Controversially,
the word “lesbian” was not used on the plaque.
Lister,
from a wealthy family, inherited Shibden Hall, a Tudor mansion, near Halifax.
She was closely involved in running her estate, well-read, well-travelled, and
the only female co-founder of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society.
She dressed always in black and spoke openly in her deep voice of her interest
in other women. Locally she was mocked as “Gentleman Jack”. “Does your cock
stand?” someone in the street once jeered, and anonymous hate mail started
arriving at Shibden Hall. Angela Steidele, translated from German by Katy
Derbyshire, notes that, even when physically threatened, Lister remained calmly
committed to her lifestyle, and confident that “God was on her side, as she was
His creature too”.
Steidele’s
main source is Lister’s diary, discovered at the hall after her death. The 24
volumes, beginning in 1816 when she was 25, cover everything “from Prussia’s
political standing in Europe to the care of her toenails”. Lister provides
precise daily notes on the weather, public health, industry, conditions on a
slave ship, new publications etc. Extracts from her diaries were posthumously
published at the end of the 19th century in the Halifax Guardian, under the
staid title “Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago”. What
remained unpublished was the sixth of the diary that is encrypted in a
combination of ancient Greek letters and algebra. Extracts from these sections,
which contain graphic descriptions of Lister’s sex life, first appeared in the
1980s, but today there are still passages of the diary that have never been
deciphered or transcribed. Steidele makes grateful use of the work of five
generations of scholars, not attempting further decoding but drawing together
what has already been revealed to tell the story of Lister’s “insubordinate
life and loves in a single volume”.
The first
chapter begins with Lister falling in love with a classmate aged 14 or 15.
Eliza Raine had been born in Madras, one of two daughters of an English surgeon
and an Indian, Tamil-speaking woman. After their father’s early death, Eliza
and her sister were adopted and brought to York. Eliza’s dark skin and beauty
would haunt Lister, but the liaison ended badly. Lister moved on quickly to
other lovers, while Eliza, after falling out with her adoptive father, was
committed to a mental asylum for the rest of her life. Steidele says that
Lister may have “had a personal interest in having her declared insane. Coming
from a madwoman, any confession about their former relationship would have
borne less weight.” She speculates that Eliza may have been the model for Mrs
Rochester, since Charlotte Brontë, living and writing not far away in Haworth,
knew the Clifton asylum where Eliza was held.
Another
of Lister’s early loves was Mariana Belcombe, also a doctor’s daughter. Mariana
tactfully ignored Lister’s menstruation and avoided “anything that reminded me
of my petticoats”. With Mariana, Steidele argues, Lister could be “the
gentleman she felt herself to be”. But Mariana could not resist the material
gains of marriage to a wealthy male suitor, 19 years older. She told Lister she
hoped to be widowed soon (her new husband was 44) and that they would then live
comfortably together. It was after Mariana’s husband intercepted one of
Lister’s letters that she invented the special code for recording her sex life.
Meanwhile, he pursued his own extramarital affairs and passed a venereal
disease to Mariana, who infected Lister. Steidele reasons that this must have
been trichomoniasis, which could be easily treated with a course of antibiotics
today, but in Lister’s time resulted in heavy discharge and itching , and led
her to seek a mercury cure in Paris.
After more love affairs and years of
travel, Lister came back to Shibden Hall in 1832, determined to make a
materially advantageous marriage of her own, even though a union between two
women could not be legally recognised. Her prime prospect was Ann Walker, 12
years younger, the heiress to “new money” derived from steam-powered weaving
mills. Lister calculated: “The object of my choice has perhaps three thousand a
year or near it, probably two-thirds at her own disposal.” Steidele crisply
summarises the situation: “Anne was interested in Ann’s money; Ann wanted sex.”
By
the time they informally celebrated their wedding in Holy Trinity in 1834,
their sexual relationship was faltering beneath the exchange of rings and vows.
As their private life disintegrated, they rented a pew and went to church
together to display their coupledom in public. Finally, to distract themselves
from one another, they set off together on ever more ambitious travels, to the
Pyrenees, Russia and Azerbaijan. In the wilderness, this unconventional couple
mimicked conventional etiquette: “Being a gentleman, Anne always insisted on
giving Ann the better place to sleep – ‘1 divan (carpeted) for Ann and a long low
table for me’ – and gave her the best pickings of their meals.”
Lister died in 1840, probably from typhus, and
Ann died in 1860 in the same asylum as Lister’s first lover. Steidele’s steely
account of the lives behind the first rainbowed plaque is a triumph of truth
over fantasy. Lister’s extraordinary pioneering life deserves to be remembered,
even if, in Steidele’s words, she was “a beast of a woman”.
Gentleman Jack by Angela Steidele review –
seductions of a secret diarist. By Ruth Scurr. The Guardian , November 9, 2018.
If Anne Lister had her way, no one
would have known of her lesbian affairs.
But thanks to the efforts of a
fellow Yorkshire woman, the world discovered her diaries and her passions,
winning her the title of Britain’s first modern lesbian.
Born in 1791, Lister was a contemporary of some of British literature’s
most famed authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Lord Byron,
but her work only became known to the world in the late 1980s, when Helena
Whitbread, who grew up in Halifax like Lister, discovered, deciphered and
published her diaries.
Now the subject of documentaries,
theatre plays and an upcoming BBC series, Lister had taken great care to ensure
no one would ever be able to read the most personal parts of her 6,600-page
diaries.
“Anne
was a lover of the classics and the code she made was a mix of Greek letters
and some symbols she devised on her own,” Whitbread tells PinkNews. “She was
quite confident that no one would ever be able to crack the code.”
But Whitbread was not even the first
to crack the code—she simply used the key left behind by one of Lister’s
descendent, John Lister, who found the diaries in the family estate Shibden
Hall and worked together with his friend Arthur Burrell to decode them.
“Anne Lister had written, ‘In God is
my’ and then she wrote four symbols, and it could have only been ‘hope,'”
Whitbread explains, “They worked all day and all night and they finally
uncovered the secrets, and they were horrified by it.”
John, himself gay, was worried the
diaries may attract attention upon his own sexuality—in 1890s Britain,
homosexual acts were illegal.
Burrell wanted to burn the
diaries—but John ended up hiding them instead. The diaries were found in 1933,
after John died and Shibden Hall became property of the local council, but even
then they were mostly concealed from public view in the town’s library.
“No
one was allowed to read the code and there was a great deal of secrecy about
it, and that went on until I found them in 1983,” Whitbread remembers.
Upon her discovery, Whitbread began
the lengthy process of decoding and editing the diaries for publication. The
first volume, I Know My Own Heart, would come out in 1988 and cause a stir
within the academic community.
“It
was the first written account of a lesbian having affairs with women, and
actually explaining and be very explicit about her sexual encounters with
them,” Whitbread says. “As far as we know, there is no other document in the
world that has written so explicitly about lesbian love affairs.”
Her diaries, in which Lister
famously uses “X,” not to mean kiss, but to stand for an orgasm, also revealed
what Lister felt like about her sexuality and the role she was expected to play
in Regency England.
“She genuinely thought there was no
one else like her,” Whitbread says. “She said: ‘I am an enigma onto myself and
I do excite my own curiosity.’ And another quote, ‘Alas, I am neither man nor
woman in society, how shall i manage?’ She really thought she was the only
woman with that sexuality.”
Lister
had her first lesbian relationship at 14 with one of her classmates, Eliza
Raine, but she nonetheless felt lonely, rejecting marriage and wanted instead
to find a woman to love freely. “There is a thread of loneliness throughout her
journals, she wanted to find the right woman with whom she could live, and live
happily,” Whitbread says.
Since Whitbread published her
diaries, Lister’s work has influenced and inspired its readers. Room writer
Emma Donoghue, who is a lesbian, described Lister as her “hero” in a piece for
The Guardian in 2010.
“She also had the sexual ethics of a
bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy. Why is Lister my hero,
then? Because she looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there
with unflinching precision,” Donoghue wrote.
Lister’s contribution to British
history was officially recognised last year, when a plaque was unveiled outside
Holy Trinity Church, commemorating her unofficial marriage to the last love of
her life, Ann Walker.
The plaque was marred by controversy
as it originally only defined Lister as “gender non-conforming,” which prompted
accusations of lesbian erasure and a petition signed by more than 2,500 people.
York Civic Trust, York LGBT Forum,
York LGBT History Month and the Churches Conservation Trust then jointly
announced that they would change the sign’s wording. The new plaque, due to be
unveiled on February 28 to mark the end of LGBT History Month, will read:
“Lesbian and Diarist; took sacrament here to seal her union with Ann Walker.”
Whitbread
is not sure whether Lister would be pleased with the public attention her
relationships with women have received.
“I doubt she will be happy with
those very intimate revelations, if she’d still be looking at it with her early
19th century mentality,” she says.
“She
did say to her aunt, ‘I have a desire to make a name for myself in the world.’
Well, she’s certainly got her name in the world now, but I’m not quite sure
she’d like the way her life has been depicted in all its sexual detail—but you
never know.”
The controversy over the plaque once
again brought the diarist into the spotlight, allowing more people, like
playwright and theatre director Ross McGregor, to discover her work.
“I was instantly intrigued by this
amazing woman that I had been ashamedly ignorant of up until this point,”
McGregor tells PinkNews.
He explains: “I loved that she
decided quite early on to wear only black to ‘escape the tyranny of fashion,’
that she regularly practised firing a pistol for her own pleasure, and was
determined to better herself by masterminding her own classic education far
beyond what was usually offered to ladies of her station, and that she used
church on a Sunday to scout for potential new conquests, scanning the pews with
her eyeglasses for romantic prey.
“And
of course, there is her iconic phrase ‘the intellect has no gender,’ which in
essence sums Anne Lister’s mindset up precisely.”
McGregor devoured Lister’s work and
wrote the play Gentleman Jack—as she was known to the locals in Halifax during
her lifetime—which hit the stage in London in January. A BBC drama of the same
name, starring Suranne Jones, will screen this year, but has no relation to the
play.
Lister’s defiance of gender norms
brought her difficulties in life, but in death is what ultimately defines her
as Britain’s first modern lesbian.
“Lesbian identity, perhaps to Anne’s
advantage, was never taken seriously enough to be hated or prohibited. This
ignorance and irrelevance ironically gave Anne the sexual freedom to pursue her
desires almost entirely unimpeded. It was only when she sought to legitimise
her lifestyle that she encountered issues,” McGregor notes.
“What is refreshing about Anne’s
point of view is that she bears no shame, no self-hatred, she never seeks to
change or hide what she is, or what she does.
“She considers herself to be ‘one of
God’s creatures’ and that she is made exactly how he intended, so why bother
changing it?” McGregor adds, touching on Lister’s resonance with contemporary
audiences two centuries since she wrote the diaries.
Anne Lister, Britain’s first modern
lesbian, didn’t want you to know about her sex life. By
Sofia Lotto Persio. Pink News , February 16, 2019
see also : Anne Lister :
The First Modern Lesbian. By Rico Morton. Rico Morton, 2008
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