It is a commonplace in discussions of Anne Lister to identify her as a self-proclaimed Tory, and eventually a Tory landowner. But the Lister of the diaries also fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero, a champion of Romantic individualism that sits somewhat oddly with her sense of social entitlement. I have argued elsewhere that Lister’s conservatism may have been compensatory, a form of normalisation and possibly of protection. In this chapter I complicate those arguments by looking more closely and more broadly at Lister’s politics - and politics with both a capital and a small ’p’. Lister lived during an age of revolution and reaction, of Napoleonic wars, of abolitionist agitation, of the first major Reform Act, of colonial expansion, of early industrialisation and rail travel. What were her attitudes to these major phenomena that do not necessarily line up neatly with a single party? What issues did she care about, and what did being a (non-voting, because female) Tory mean to her? Were there chinks in her conservative political philosophy? Did her views change over time? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not compensatory at all, but rather part and parcel of her self-fashioning as a lesbian?

This chapter considers how Anne Lister negotiated a place and identity for herself in (and beyond) Halifax society through her engagement in associational activity. This chapter positions Lister’s intellectual activity in the wider context of the opportunities for women’s participation in civic and intellectual life in this period, on a local and regional level, by considering her membership of more formal networks such as the York Friendly Society and the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, alongside informal ones of prominent local families. Lister’s status in her home town of Halifax was particular and unusual owing to the relatively open secret of her sexual nonconformity, as well as her propertied status as the owner of Shibden Hall. Building on the important work by Jill Liddington in Female Fortune (1998), which establishes Lister’s construction of a landed gentry identity that could compete with her fellow landowners, this chapter examines how far this exceptionality was able to carry her in evading the usual gendered constraints of intellectual life, and the ways in which she deployed traditionally patriarchal forms of power in accessing, promoting and disseminating civic projects such as the new ‘Lit and Phil’.

This Introduction highlights the importance of this collection - the first of its kind - for showcasing the paradigm-shifting quality of the Anne Lister archive. It describes Lister’s growing importance to a range of disciplines that include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, life writing and travel writing. It outlines how Lister’s transgression of gender and sexual boundaries not only marked and shaped every aspect of her lived experience, but also has challenged our understanding of the evolution of sexual and gendered narratives up to the present. Decoding Anne Lister includes interviews and essays on Lister’s queer sexuality and gender variance, her role as a diarist, her pushing of gender barriers through her involvement in local politics and in the managing of her Shibden Hall estate, her adventurous and at times gender-defying travels through Britain, Europe and the Russian Caucasus, and on the highly successful adaptation of the Lister diaries into the BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack. Each chapter shows how the Lister diaries have helped to reconfigure the more traditional trajectories of nineteenth-century histories of gender and sexuality, and of social and political life.

In July 2018, the York Civic Trust unveiled the first rainbow plaque in the UK, commemorating Anne Lister’s union with Ann Walker. The plaque, at the church in York where the two women celebrated their bond by taking communion together, sparked controversy with its labelling of Lister as ‘gender-nonconforming entrepreneur’. Following a consultation period, a new plaque describing Lister as ‘lesbian and diarist’ was unveiled in February 2019. On 3 April 2019 (Lister’s birthday), a third plaque was presented at Shibden Hall, the house and estate she inherited from her uncle. Avoiding the controversy of the first York plaque, it described Lister as ‘diarist, businesswoman, landowner, traveller and lesbian who recorded much of her personal life in a secret code’. Lister herself repeatedly insists on the naturalness of her desire for women, as well as on her own exceptionalism. Yet her diaries also show her looking for women like her, not as sexual partners but as models (the Ladies of Llangollen) or as kindred spirits (the masculine bluestocking Miss Pickford). This chapter explores the implications and the stakes of attempts to classify and categorise Anne Lister according to past and present rubrics of gender and sexuality.

Travel was key to Anne Lister’s sense of self and has played an important part in shaping her posthumous reputation. Famously, she was the first amateur to climb the Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838 and died on one of her most ambitious journeys to Russia in 1840. Scholarship on her diaries in the mid-twentieth century highlighted these and other more local travels. Changing social attitudes, which made possible the publication of decoded passages of Lister’s diaries in the 1980s, meant that Lister’s diaries were no longer valued primarily for their social history content. To understand Lister’s life fully we need, I suggest, to investigate more closely how Anne Lister’s diaries can be read as life writing and travel writing. Citing evidence from Lister’s home tours in the 1820s, I will argue that a distinctive female voice such as Lister’s is an important,but until now neglected, element in the recovery of female travel writing, which has been a recent focus for scholars. I will show that descriptions of travel in Lister’s diaries offer both a rich resource for the study of tourism and also contribute to our understanding of her emotional life and relationships.

In 1831, Anne Lister wrote that she ‘found distinctly for the first time’ her own clitoris. This culminated a search of at least eleven years, involving much exploration of her own and her female lovers’ anatomy. Of course, her explicit diaries made clear that she touched her own and her lovers’ clitorises, but she was not able to link her own sensations with the anatomical terms she found in textbooks. By looking at Lister’s quest to find the clitoris, we can understand in more detail how difficult it was for women to conceptualise this important part of their bodies. If Anne Lister, a brilliant, erudite woman very knowledgeable about science and anatomy, and very sexually experienced with women, took so long to figure it out, it must have been much more difficult for ordinary women. The most startling aspect of how discourses could affect perception was that Lister spent ten years confusing the clitoris with the cervix, leading to fruitless explorations of her own body and those of her lovers. This chapter will thus contribute to the larger historiography about the history of the clitoris - when it appeared in anatomical books, and when some medical texts started to downplay or omit it.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.

This chapter traces the complex relationship between Anne Lister and the English dictionary. Lister was an enthusiastic user of lexicons of all kinds - general, bilingual, historical and classical. By the time she turned thirty, she had compiled her own private glossary of erotic and anatomical terms as a means of making sense of her sexuality. In recent years, Lister’s life has been chronicled in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, while her diaries have been sporadically quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus far, however, Lister’s use of and by dictionaries has remained underexamined. On the one hand, though lesbian and queer scholars have provided valuable insights into Lister’s reading habits, they have not given sustained attention to her reading of dictionaries. On the other hand, dictionary scholars have until lately neglected the history of women lexicographers, while women’s writing in general has been underrepresented in the quotation banks of dictionaries from Samuel Johnson’s to the OED. This chapter begins by exploring Lister’s imaginative use of dictionaries, then surveys how her idiosyncrasies of speech and writing diverged from the linguistic and social norms endorsed by the standard lexicographers of her day.

This chapter focuses on an area of Lister’s writing that has been overlooked in recent scholarship: the relationship between coding and closeting in the diaries. It suggests that more work is needed on the psychological processing within the diary volumes, and that the complexity of these volumes has not been well served by readings based on, or within, lesbian continuum models. In this chapter I propose an analytical framework derived from a combination of contemporary queer theory and historicism to recover Lister’s self-conscious closet. The relationship between coded and uncoded sections of the diaries is also ripe for further analysis. In using these alternating spaces, Lister chooses when, and when not, to disclose aspects of her queerness. The Lister of the diary volumes is never closeted from herself and is aware of her own ’oddity’ at the same time as she asserts her own version of normality. This chapter illustrates how a differently framed reading of the decoded sections can foreground the neglected dichotomy between coding and closeting. It also proposes new readings of the uncoded sections of the diary text, which show how these areas produce an additional public closet in which Lister depersonalises some of her writing.

Against the longstanding force of charges that certain sexualities are ‘unnatural’, Anne Lister grounds her astonishing confidence squarely in an argument about nature. For her, nature serves as a rationale rather than a general prohibition or quasi-juridical bar against a sexual expression she had reason to consider fairly unique. Indeed, Lister’s interpretation of nature provided not only a lens, or even a kind of permission, but a profound authorisation of who or what she saw herself to be, of what she called ‘my ways’. Rather than seeing herself as turning away from nature or somehow violating its laws, she was doing the opposite: she was following natural prescriptions. ’Odd’, surely, and ’queer’ in the broadest sense - but not ‘deviant’. How, then, did Lister understand nature, itself one of the richest concepts in the history of ideas? What intellectual, scientific and theological resources made this reading of nature available to her, and what innovations did she add to the repertoire? The chapter elucidates Lister’s brilliant synthesis of theology, Latin poetry and natural history to naturalise her ‘ways’ - indeed, to the point where she could assert ‘When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and, from that moment, become inconsistent with ourselves’ as a queer motto for erotic persuasion.

This chapter explores the relationship between Anne Lister and her home, Shibden Hall. Initially just a locally known, ’hidden gem’ of a council-funded visitor attraction with around fifteen thousand visitors a year, it is now internationally known as ’the Home of Anne Lister’, the lesbian icon and prolific diarist, traveller, mountaineer and businesswoman. Shibden Hall is now a ’literary house’, esteemed alongside the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, for example, with which a joint conference, ’Interpreting Anne Lister and the Brontës’, was recently held. This new status could barely have been conceived of five years ago when I started as Collections Manager for Calderdale Museum Service, which manages Shibden Hall. In this chapter I will examine how Shibden Hall and its landscape defined Anne’s remarkable life and the imprint she has left on them in return, which can still be experienced today; bringing people closer to the ’real’ Anne alongside the extensive diaries and now-iconic, top-hatted ’Gentleman Jack’ character. I will also consider the challenges faced by a small museum service in delivering expectations, the difficulties in representing historic stories within a museum setting and the complexities involved in constructing the historical past.

As an archive, the Anne Lister diaries are an extraordinary tale of survival, in that the diaries came close to being destroyed and their coded content was kept hidden until Helena Whitbread, an independent scholar from Halifax, published the first coded extracts with Virago Press in 1988. Gonda’s interview follows Whitbread’s journey of discovery into the coded sections of the diaries and the laborious process of decrypting the diaries by hand, before computers had become generally available. As Whitbread delved deeper into the Lister archive, her sense of its importance increased exponentially and she began to understand the need to have coded extracts from the diaries published as a book available to the public. Whitbread then published a second volume of extracts in 1992 and she discusses what made her decide to focus on Lister’s intimate relationships in the vast five-million-word archive available to her. Currently working on an Anne Lister biography, Whitbread shares her own affective relationship with the Lister diaries over the years and responds to the unprecedented fame Lister has achieved in part as a result of the Gentleman Jack series. This has included key transformations in Whitbread’s own public life as one of the founders of Lister scholarship.

BAFTA-winning British television writer/director/producer Sally Wainwright is known for her commitment to telling women’s stories as well as to her home county of Yorkshire. She used to visit Anne Lister’s Shibden Hall as a child, and her twenty years of effort to bring a drama about Lister to the small screen - after being repeatedly turned down by those who saw it as unfilmable or niche - has finally paid off with the runaway success of the BBC/HBO’s Gentleman Jack, set in 1832 when Lister began courting Ann Walker. The two-season TV series is notable not just for how it draws on the whole corpus of the past four decades of Lister research - thoughtfully balancing accuracy against the requirements of family-friendly, prestige primetime drama - but for the way it has in turn nourished a new wave of scholarship. When Wainwright won the 2016 Wellcome Screenwriting Fellowship which is intended to buy a writer time and space to work, she generously funded the scanning and online publication of all 7,720 pages of Lister’s diaries by West Yorkshire Archive Service and Calderdale Museums, which has enabled the ongoing, crowdsourced transcription of this extraordinary corpus.