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.

In 1839/40 Anne Lister, together with her wife, Ann Walker, travelled to Russia and the Caucasus, where she suddenly died. While I was working on my biography of Lister, I followed their steps from Saint Petersburg via Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, and from there along the Volga river to Kazan. Another trip took me from the Russian-Georgian border in the Dariali Gorge via Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Zugdidi in Georgia to Baku in Azerbaijan. Doubts accompanied every step of my biographical research. What do towns, landscapes and people still have to reveal about Anne Lister? My road trip through the Caucasus ends figuratively in my biographer’s garage: What do we really discover when we try to travel back in time? What do we involuntarily or even necessarily invent in writing Anne Lister’s life? What did she invent already while writing (she herself being her first biographer)? Is there any history without a narrator? Which history? Whose biography? For the volume Decoding Anne Lister, I have chosen several sections from Travelling in Time, which will be translated into English for the first time. These cover Anne Lister and Ann Walker’s journey through the Georgian mountains from the end of June until the beginning of August 1840.