'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 'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history; they changed everything. By resurrecting them and editing them with such loving attention and intelligence, Helena Whitbread has earned the gratitude of a whole generation' EMMA DONOGHUE When this volume of Anne Lister's diaries was first published in 1988, it was hailed as a vital piece of lost lesbian history. The editor, Helena Whitbread, had spent years painstakingly researching and transcribing Lister's extensive journals, much of which were written in an elaborate code - what Lister called her 'crypthand', which allowed her to record her life in intimate, and at times, explicit, detail. Until then, Anne Lister's lesbianism had been supressed or hinted at; this was the first time her story had been told. Anne Lister defied the role of nineteenth-century womanhood: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller and lesbian - a woman who lived her life on her own terms. '[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us. She was a woman exercising conscious choice. She controlled her cash and her body. At a time when women had to marry, or be looked after by a male relative, and when all their property on marriage passed to their husband, Anne Lister not only dodged the traps of being female, she set up a liaison with another woman that enhanced her own wealth and left both of them free to live as they wished . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON These diaries include the years 1816-1824. The second volume, continuing Anne's story, THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER: NO PRIEST BUT LOVE, is now available.
Release date:
June 19, 2012
Publisher:
Little, Brown UK
Print pages:
384
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
It is to Dr Betteridge and his excellent team of archivists that my first debt of gratitude must be paid. They have given
unstintingly of their time, expertise, good humour and friendly advice throughout the period I was engaged in actively researching
this book. My grateful thanks to them and also to the staff of the Reference Library, next to the archive department, whose
help was as willingly forthcoming when the archives were closed.
To my many friends and colleagues in secondary education in Calderdale whom I have met whilst working as a supply teacher,
I can only say thank you for your interest in the Anne Lister saga. Support and encouragement has come from many quarters,
not least from language teachers when I was struggling with some rather puzzling quotations in French, Latin and Greek which
occur in Anne’s scholarly journals. My own deficiencies in those areas have been nicely camouflaged, thanks to their help.
To Ruthie Petrie and Rosalind Smith I extend my thanks and appreciation. As my editors and advisers at Virago Press they have
guided me and helped to shape the book into a manageable publication.
A special thank you to Caroline Davidson whose own work on The World of Mary Ellen Best brought about our friendship. Her constructive advice, her scholarly interest in my work, and her professional expertise
in, and knowledge of, the publishing world have been immensely beneficial to me.
My immediate family, of course, have been intimately involved in the whole proceedings from the start. To Rachel and her friend,
Ruthanne Gregory, I give my thanks and love for their patient research undertaken in York on my behalf. To my son, Philip,
for his work in Calderdale archives at times when I was unable to go myself and for his continuing interest and support in
my literary activities, many thanks are due and my very best hopes and wishes for his own literary work. To my two other daughters,
Claire and Elizabeth, go my thanks for their patience and tolerance. Immersed as they are in busy family and business lives,
with all the attendant problems such lives bring, they have nevertheless been a willing and sympathetic audience when I have
expounded on my literary problems, of which there have been not a few. Lastly, a very special thank you to my husband, Bob,
whose role in the whole undertaking has been of crucial importance in enabling me to work as freely as I have done. Role-reversal
situations are no longer a novelty in these times of mass unemployment and the professionalization of women, but degrees of
willingness and efficiency must vary. I can only say that the smooth running of the domestic scene has, for the last few years,
been entirely due to his efforts and has been the most important factor of all in enabling me to embark, somewhat belatedly,
on my writing career, the first fruits of which lie in the present publication.
My thanks go to my editor at Virago, Donna Coonan, and my agent, Caroline Davidson, for their help and guidance in the preparation
of this new edition. It remains for me to say that throughout the whole undertaking, historical and textual accuracy have
been an over-riding concern; I have placed it equally in importance with my desire to elucidate the life of a courageous and
extraordinary woman.
In their entirety, the journals of Anne Lister run to four million words. They are contained in two thin blue exercise books
and twenty-four small hardback volumes. The journals evolve over a number of years: although they begin in 1806, it isn’t
until 1808 that the entries become more detailed and Anne introduces the rudiments of what is eventually to become an elaborate
code – her ‘crypthand’ as she called it – the use of which allowed her the freedom to describe her intimate life in great
detail.
The idea of using an esoteric code appears to have had its roots in Anne’s burgeoning knowledge of the Greek language: she
mingles Greek letters with other symbols of her own devising. She felt safe in the belief that no one would be able to decipher
the coded passages, and as her confidence grew, they became longer and much more explicit when dealing with those aspects
of her life which could not be written about in ‘plainhand’.
The history of the concealment of the journals is a story in itself. Whether or not Anne Lister intended to destroy them before
her death is a debatable point. In 1840, her premature death in Russia, at the age of forty-nine, precluded any such decision
on her part. Her journals remained intact at Shibden Hall for a period of almost sixty years until, in 1887, John Lister,
the last remaining member of the Lister family to occupy Shibden Hall, decided to publish some of the plainhand extracts in
the local paper under the title ‘Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago’. The crypthand passages had not yet been
deciphered and their content was still unknown.
However, the secrets buried within Anne’s cryptic code were about to be discovered. John Lister and his friend, Arthur Burrell,
a Bradford schoolteacher and antiquarian, decided to set themselves the task of attempting to unravel the code. What they
found was, to them, so disturbing that Burrell thought they ought to burn the journals immediately. What was it that so shocked
these two educated Victorian gentlemen? Arthur Burrell put it into words some years later when he wrote that: ‘The contents
of this cipher… is an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many “friends”; hardly any one of
them escaped her.’
It was not merely the revelation of his predecessor’s sexual activities with members of her own sex that so dismayed John
Lister. He also worried that local scandal about his own sexual orientation would be brought to the notice of the higher authorities.
In that era, the late 1890s, homosexual acts between men were punishable by law, as the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 demonstrated.
Despite Burrell’s advice that the journals be burnt, John Lister was reluctant to destroy such an important historical document.
His antiquarian instincts could not allow him to countenance such an act of vandalism and, instead, he replaced the journals
behind one of the panels in Shibden Hall, where they remained until after his death in 1933. He never published another word
from what he now saw as the infamous document which his predecessor, Anne Lister, had left behind.
Shibden Hall fell into the possession of Halifax Town Council after John Lister died. He had become bankrupt some years before.
A friend and Halifax philanthropist, Mr A. S. McCrea, purchased the estate and gave the grounds to the people of Halifax as
a public park, but stipulated that John Lister could remain in the Hall for the remainder of his life, after which it would
revert to the Borough of Halifax for the enjoyment of the townspeople.
Prior to its opening as a museum in June 1934, an inventory of all the Lister documents was made and the journals made the
transition from private hands to public property. Inevitably questions were raised about the coded passages. The town clerk
of Halifax wrote to Arthur Burrell in an attempt to clear up the mystery, but he received a reluctant reply. The only person
who could provide the answer was initially unwilling to reveal the clues to the code: ‘You must excuse my hesitations: I am
not in full possession of what old Halifax scandal knows about Miss Lister; and as I say, I do not want to be the means of
allowing a very unsavoury document to see even a partial light.’ He did, however, have scruples about withholding the information
and went on to say: ‘At the same time I have, as a student, the feeling that someone (and preferably someone in Halifax, and
a Librarian) should be, so to speak, armed with a knowledge of what the cipher contains.’ A copy of the key to the code was
placed in the possession of Edward Green, Halifax’s chief librarian at the time, who kept it locked in his safe.
The task of cataloguing and indexing the Shibden Hall muniments fell to his daughter, Muriel, a young woman who was working
towards her librarianship qualifications. Her father had given her a copy of the key to the code used by Anne Lister in her
journals but for her dissertation Muriel chose to work on the letters of Anne Lister instead. As she said in an interview
with Jill Liddington (whose book, Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax 1791–1840, tells the story of how different historians have written about Anne Lister):
I don’t think my father knew much about Anne Lister, that she was a lesbian or anything. And I never mentioned it. We didn’t talk about it much in those days. It would have cast a slur on the good name of the Lister family if it were
known then, so I didn’t put it into my Letters at all. It doesn’t come into the Letters really.
A twenty-year period of comparative silence followed until 1958, when Dr Phyllis Ramsden, a historian who lived in Halifax,
and her London friend, Vivien Ingham, obtained permission to work jointly on the journals. No major publication resulted from
their research, although Phyllis Ramsden did attempt to write a book about Anne’s travels. Vivien Ingham focused on Anne’s
adventurous mountain-climbing, ‘Anne Lister in the Pyrenees’, while Phyllis Ramsden wrote a more general paper entitled ‘Anne
Lister’s Journal (1817–1840)’.
But, here again, the secret of Anne’s sexuality, although known to the researchers, was carefully concealed. The authorities
in Halifax, worried about scandal, insisted on vetting any material which Ramsden and Ingham might wish to publish. Dr Ramsden
herself cooperated in the cover-up by stating that the coded passages in Anne’s journals were ‘excruciatingly tedious
to the modern mind… and of no historical interest whatsoever.’ Ramsden’s dismissal of what has since been recognised as a
unique contribution to the history of women’s sexuality in the early nineteenth century was somewhat redeemed by her colleague,
Vivien Ingham, who wrote that anyone who wished to undertake serious work on the life of Anne Lister could not afford to ignore
the contents of the coded passages in her journals.
The history of the secret sexual life of Anne Lister remained behind an iron curtain of conspiracy by those ‘in the know’
– a handful of Halifax town officials and one or two scholars. That situation was about to change. The liberalising decade
of the 1960s saw the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), which legalised homosexual activity so long as it was conducted in private and between consenting adults. The following two
decades saw an extension of this climate of toleration and, as the homosexual community became more visible and vocal in their
demand for equal rights, it became possible to speak, or write, openly about the lives of lesbian or gay people.
It was in the early 1980s that I first came across the Anne Lister journals, a serendipitous discovery that radically altered
the course of my life. I had completed my degree and wanted to carry on studying with a view to publication. Due to work and
home commitments I decided to look close to home for a suitable subject – one which I could fit around the other demands in
my life.
Anne Lister of Shibden Hall was vaguely familiar to me as a woman of some importance in Halifax during her lifetime. I also
knew that some of her letters had been published from time to time in the local newspaper. Apart from these scanty facts,
I knew nothing about her. I thought it would be interesting to know more about her life, so I visited the archive department
of my home-town library. The Anne Lister letters were available on microfilm and, given my incompetence with machines of any
kind, the young archivist obligingly placed the reel on the reader for me.
What I saw made me consider the complexities of the work I was about to undertake. On many of the letters Lister had used
up every bit of available space by turning the paper around at a ninety-degree angle and writing across the original lines
of the page. This technique formed a trellis-like effect which, in addition to the small handwriting, looked rather daunting.
As I sat staring dubiously at the difficult material before me, the archivist asked, ‘Did you know she kept a journal?’ It
has since amazed me how those seven small words set me on a literary and academic journey which, to date, has lasted almost three decades.
The microfilm reels were changed over and the next sight to meet my eyes was a coded page of Anne Lister’s journal. If you
turn to the example included in this book, you might be able to gauge what my feelings were when confronted with those lines
and lines of unintelligible symbols – a sight much more puzzling than the trellised letters. But I was hooked. Curiosity,
allied to the thrill of an intellectual challenge, gripped me. What was this woman, living in the early nineteenth century,
hiding? I there and then decided that, if at all possible, I would unravel the mysteries concealed in the pages of Anne Lister’s
journals. I had found my research project!
The extant journals, so I believed in the initial stages of my research, began in March 1817 (I was to discover earlier journals
some years later). Finding that the key to the code was available, I obtained a copy of it and photocopied the first fifty
pages of the 1817 journal to take home with me. From then on, for the next three years, I visited the archives weekly, collected
fifty pages each time, and made it my next week’s work to read and decode the material. As I worked through the journal I
became very aware that Anne Lister’s life, which was so rich, historically, and complex, was far too valuable to be buried
in the archives, hidden in an esoteric code. But there were many textual difficulties to overcome if I wished, as I did, to
place Anne Lister’s journals before a reading public.
When I began the collation of the two types of scripts, I found Anne’s handwriting almost as difficult to decipher as the
code had been. This was particularly the case when she wanted to economise on paper by cramming the pages as fully as possible
with very small handwriting, or when she was writing in a hurry or in a state of great emotion. Her usual method, especially
whilst travelling, was to jot down memoranda in small note-books, on odd pieces of paper or, occasionally, a slate and then write it up in her journal wherever she happened to be lodged. I
endeavoured to place her at the time of writing by putting the location at the head of each entry along with the date.
Anne’s spelling of some words can be seen, by today’s standards, as idiosyncratic; for example, ‘shewed’ for ‘showed’; ‘sopha’
for ‘sofa’; ‘poney’ for ‘pony’, etc. Where each of these spellings first occurs, I have indicated this by ‘sic’ and thereafter
left her spellings as they are. Anne also used to vary the spellings of some of her friends’ names; for instance, Miss Brown/Browne.
I have left these unchanged.
Almost every other word written by Anne in plainhand is abbreviated, a habit which, while economical on paper, makes the reading
of the text difficult. There have been other obstacles to surmount in presenting the diaries; for instance, the use of a dash
in place of a full stop at the end of a sentence; the lack of paragraphs when Anne passed from one subject to another in the
same diary entry; the non-use, on many occasions, of the personal pronoun, and other small difficulties too tedious to enumerate.
The coded sections posed different problems. A superficial scrutiny of these texts gives no indication whatsoever of any form
of punctuation and, to add to the obfuscation which Anne obviously intended, there is no space between individual words. Only
when every symbol in each extract had been decoded could a sense of what was written emerge. Even then, it had to be the decision
of the decoder to impose a structure on the sequence of words that emerged – to define where words and sentences begin and
end. Italics have been used throughout the text to distinguish the ‘crypthand’ passages from the ones written in ‘plainhand’.
After five years hard, albeit enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, work I felt that I knew Anne Lister well enough to
venture into print. I wanted to share with the reader the fascination I had experienced on reading Anne’s own words: the small,
local world of Halifax and, eventually, a wider world beyond that, spring vividly to life in the pages of her journals. What
we read is an authentic depiction of the fictionalised scenarios provided by writers of her day: Mrs Gaskell’s small town
of Cranford; Jane Austen’s genteel society novels; and, given the wildness of the Yorkshire countryside around Halifax and Anne Lister’s
passionate love affairs, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Anne Lister’s writings, in their mixture of sophistication and gaucherie, demonstrate a tension in her life that she attempted
to resolve by committing her thoughts to her journal. The use of her code involved a great deal of labour, but its worth to
Anne as a means of expressing that ‘disguised & hidden nature that suits not with the world’ was invaluable: ‘I tell myself
to myself & throw the burden on the book & feel relieved.’ [31 May 1824.]
Her conservatism generated a fierce pride in family, a stubborn adherence to church, king and country, and an inability to
empathise with the sufferings of the poor or admit the justice of the democratic spirit which was abroad in the years of the
French Revolution. Nevertheless, in education, travel and not least in her determination to live her later life openly as
a lesbian with a woman of her choice, Anne can be seen as a trail-blazer for the emancipation of women from the mores of her
day. She became the first woman to be elected to the committee of the Halifax branch of the Literary and Philosophical Society
because of her academic contributions to that society. She managed her estate, dealt with the business of farming, and developed
coal-mines on her land. Much of her working life was spent out of doors, supervising workmen and, at times, tackling some
of the physical tasks herself.
The romantic element in her nature drove her to explore the wilder parts of the world, to see things for herself and commit
her travels to the pages of her journal for future reference and her own enjoyment. Whatever social approval or disapproval
Anne earned in her lifetime and, indeed, since her death, her journals will surely guarantee her a place in history as a woman
of outstanding courage, fearless enough to approach life on her own terms and fashion it to her liking, according to the nature
which, as she saw it, God had endowed her.
Anne was born on 3 April 1791 in my home town of Halifax, West Yorkshire, during that turbulent period of history when revolutionary
and radical ideals and actions were changing the nature of political and economic structures in Western society. Her father,
Captain Jeremy Lister, had served in the American War of Independence and was wounded at the battle of Lexington. In 1788
he married Rebecca Battle, a young heiress from Welton, a small village near North Cave in the East Riding of Yorkshire. They
had four sons, three of whom died at early ages, and two daughters, Anne and Marian. In 1813, the fourth son, Jeremy, died
from drowning at Fermoy in Eire, whilst serving in the army there. It was as a result of his death that Anne was to inherit
Shibden Hall and its estate. Anne had spent many happy childhood days there and in 1815, at the age of twenty-four and as
the putative heir to Shibden, she went to live there permanently with her Uncle James and Aunt Anne, unmarried brother and
sister. She was relieved to escape her parental home at Market Weighton, where she had been unhappy for a long time.
During the early adult years of her life at Shibden, Anne was dependent financially on her uncle and aunt with only occasional
help from her father who was usually insolvent himself. The work involved in helping to run the estate was not particularly
onerous for her and the liberal attitude of both her uncle and aunt towards their talented and unconventional niece allowed her a great deal of freedom to follow her own inclinations. She was
able to spend a great deal of time on self-education, travel and her hobbies of walking, riding, playing the flute and shooting.
To those who did not know her well, and even to some who did, she appeared eccentric. That her nickname, amongst the rougher
elements of Halifax, was ‘Gentleman Jack’ is indicative of the fact that her masculine appearance and behaviour was sufficient
to cause comment.
Anne’s status in the town, as a member of the only landowning family in the district, gave her a distinct social advantage
over enterprising local families who had grown wealthy from profits made through opportunities provided by new advances in
the manufacturing industries. Although they were by many degrees wealthier than the Listers, these entrepreneurs could not
lay claim to the ancient lineage enjoyed by the owners of Shibden Hall, which reached back to the early fourteenth century.
Anne was snobbishly aware of the high status she and her family enjoyed in the town and considered it a great condescension
on her part if she socialised with the less elite, but eminently respectable, middle-class families in the town. The trenchant
remarks she confided to her journal indicate the dissatisfaction she felt in having to seek company among those who were not,
as she saw it, her social equal.
Anne compensated for the limitations of Halifax social life by embarking upon improving her education under the tuition of
the Rev. Mr Knight, the Vicar of Halifax, studying Greek, Latin, French, mathematics, geometry and history, as well as setting
herself a demanding list of English literary texts. Her masters of style were Gibbon and Rousseau, the latter of whom she
particularly admired, and her journal, in its qualities of honesty and explicitness, was an emulation of his Confessions. Indeed, in her journal entry for Wednesday 20 August, 1823, she quotes from Rousseau: ‘Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux j’ais vus; je croix n’etre fait comme aucun
de ceux qui existent’. [I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare to say I am like no
one in the whole world.]
For this volume of excerpts from Anne Lister’s journals I have concentrated on the years 1816–24, the most emotionally dramatic
period of her life, during which the development of two of her most significant relationships with women, Mariana Lawton and
Isabella Norcliffe, is chronicled in detail. What is also brilliantly depicted is the social milieu in which she moved, particularly
in the town of Halifax and the city of York. The people in Anne’s circle are brought to life by her accounts of their day-to-day
lives, their intrigues and the petty gossip-mongering that was endemic amongst such closely knit communities.
In 1816, the date at which this book commences, Anne was twenty-five and had come to terms psychologically and emotionally
with her own sexuality, her ‘oddity’ as she called it. Her journal entry for Monday 29 January, 1821 expresses her feelings
about her sexual orientation: ‘Burnt Mr Montagu’s farewell verses that no trace of any man’s admiration may remain. It is not meet for me. I love and only
love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.’
This is an explicit statement of lesbian love and one to which she remained true to the day she died. It was also the case
that she was ‘beloved by them in turn’. Throughout her life she had no difficulty in attaching to herself the passionate and
jealous affection of a number of women whose love she returned in varying degrees of intensity.
There was, for Anne, an element of suffering during these years which stemmed from her relationship with M— (Mariana Lawton née Belcombe), daughter of a York medical practitioner. The two women had first met in 1812, when Anne was twenty-one
and M— twenty-two. Anne had quickly fallen passionately in love with M—, who returned her love, and for four years they had
enjoyed an idyllically happy sexual affair, finding as much time and as many opportunities as they could to be together. In
that era two women friends sharing a bed was not uncommon, no eyebrows were raised, no sly insinuations expressed. The prevailing
culture of ‘romantic friendship’ provided the perfect cover for love of a much deeper kind between women.
This idyll of lesbian love was shattered, however, when M—, in order to satisfy the conventions of the day and to enjoy the
material comforts his wealth could provide, accepted a proposal of marriage from Charles Lawton (C— of the journal), a wealthy
widower of Lawton Hall, Cheshire. Although Anne was bitterly hurt by this betrayal, the two women kept up a clandestine relationship
for several years, as well as maintaining a lengthy correspondence, much of it in the esoteric code invented by Anne to disguise
her intimate life with women.
The other love of Anne’s life during these years was Isabella Norcliffe, whom Anne met in York c.1809–10. Isabella (Tib of
the journals) born in 1785, was six years older than Anne. She was the eldest child of Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Norcliffe
Dalton and his wife, Ann. Their country home was Langton Hall in the small, picturesque village of Langton, near Malton, a
market town situated between York and the east coast town of Scarborough. They also had a town house in York. Like Anne, Isabella
was never to marry and at one time she had entertained hopes of becoming Anne’s life-partner. However, she had been instrumental
in introducing M— to Anne and, in so doing, quickly found that the intensity of the new relationship precluded any realisation
of her dream of a future life with Anne.
The point at which Anne’s story begins in this book, 14 August 1816, has not been an arbitrary decision on my part. The early journals, from 11 August 1806 to 22 February 1810, were written
before Anne had met Mariana Belcombe. The journals that would presumably have covered the period from 23 February 1810 to
13 August 1816 are missing. Therefore, 14 August 1816 is the first available extract in which Mariana appears. She is now
the wife of Charles Lawton and Anne Lister has been left broken-hearted.
Mariana Belcombe and Charles Lawton were married on 9 March 1816 at the small medieval church of St Michaelle-Belfrywhich
nestled in the shadow of its bigger sister church, York Minster. Masochistically, Anne not only attended the ceremony but,
together with Mariana’s sister, Anne (Nantz) Belcombe, accompanied Mariana to her new home. They were to be with Mariana for
the first six months of the marriage, following the custom of the day, in certain social circles, of helping a new bride to
settle in the marital home where all might be strange and unfamiliar to her.
The newlyweds and their entourage left York after their wedding and their first night was spent at the Bridgewater Arms hotel
in Manchester. Later, in recounting the details to a friend in Paris, Anne recalled the anguish she felt at the thought of
the sexual union between Charles and Mariana: ‘I arranged the time of getting off to bed the first night. Left Mrs Barlow to judge what I felt for I had liked M— much.’ [10 December 1824.]
In August 1816, five months after their marriage, the Lawtons, still apparently on their protracted honeymoon and still accompanied
by An
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
