Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Yorkshire has garnered interest over the past several decades, reaching vast audiences through the 2019 TV drama series about her life, Gentleman Jack. A highly educated landowner and businesswoman and intrepid traveller, Lister is best known for her diaries, which run to about five million words. Sections of the diary written in a secret code, cracked 50 years after her death, detail her intimate relationships with women, which led to her being dubbed “the first modern lesbian”. 

In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), historian Jill Liddington speaks about her latest book, As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38, an annotated selection from Lister’s diaries which provides fascinating insight into her relationship with (or “marriage” to) local heiress Ann Walker and her working life.

Jill Liddington will give a talk at LSE, Was Anne Lister a pioneer feminist or ‘at heart nothing but an old Tory squire’? on Wednesday 20 March from 6.00 to 8.00 pm. Find details and register here.

As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38. Jill Liddington. Manchester University Press. 2023.

Q: Who was Anne Lister and why do her diaries provide such remarkable evidence for feminist and lesbian history? 

Anne Lister was born in 1791 and lived in and inherited Shibden Hall outside Halifax in West Yorkshire. From when she was a teenager, she started to write a diary, and the more confident she grew in herself and the more powerful she grew, particularly after she inherited Shibden Hall on the death of her uncle in 1826, she wrote more and more. The diary is extraordinary in that it is

estimated now to be five million words, of which a sixth is in a secret code she devised to describe the more intimate details of her life. It is this combination of romantic and sexual intimacy, entrepreneurial activity and intellectual breadth that makes the diaries so magnificent. In 2011, UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World Register.

It is [the] combination of romantic and sexual intimacy, entrepreneurial activity and intellectual breadth that makes the diaries so magnificent.

Q: When was the diaries’ code (describing the more intimate details of her sexuality and relationships) cracked?

Lister, who was a great traveller, died in 1840 in Russia, and the diaries were packed away behind secret panels at Shibden Hall. Ann Walker, Anne Lister’s “wife” (they had an unofficial lesbian marriage in 1834 and lived together thereafter) inherited Shibden Hall, and on her death it went to indirect descendants, of whom the most important was John Lister. He was particularly interested in her politics, and between 1887 and 1892 he transcribed great sections of the diaries and had them published in the Halifax Guardian.

While working with a fellow scholar, Arthur Burrell, in about 1892, he succeeded in cracking Anne Lister’s code, though it wasn’t until decades later, after John Lister’s death in 1933, that an account of this was discovered in a letter by Burrell to the Halifax Librarian. He wrote, “The part written in code turned out to be entirely unpublishable. Mr. Lister was distressed, but he refused to take my advice, which was that he should burn all 26 volumes. He was, as you know, an antiquarian, and my suggestion seemed sacrilege, which perhaps it was.” Burrell continued, “The coded passages presented an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many “friends” […] this ver unsavoury document contained evidence that these friendships were criminal.”

We might wonder what made and Anne Lister’s lesbian relationships criminal. […]The 1885 Laboucher Amendment  […] didn’t include women at all, but the words that scholars use, rightly, I think, is cultural silencing.

We might wonder what made and Anne Lister’s lesbian relationships criminal. The historical context is the 1885 Laboucher Amendment which harshened the criminalisation of male homosexual activity. It didn’t include women at all, but the words that scholars use, rightly, I think, is cultural silencing. Even though there was no law against lesbian relationships, they weren’t to be spoken about, which is why we didn’t know about the code being cracked until a few years after John Lister’s death in 1933.

Q: When did the diaries came to public attention, and how did your own fascination with them arise?

In the 1950s, two other scholars, Dr Phyllis Ramsden and Vivien Ingham, started working on the code. By that stage Shibden Hall had been taken over by Halifax Borough Council. Ramsden and Ingham wrote to the town clerk for permission to publish extracts, who agreed on the condition that they be approved by the local authority committee – essentially censoring the content about her lesbian relationships.

Things changed in 1967 because of the Sexual Offenses Act which decriminalised homosexuality. Again, it only pertained to men, but it allowed more lifting of the cultural silence for women. In 1984 the Guardian published a feature called “The 2-million-word Enigma”, (it was thought at that stage that the diaries were just 2 million words) based on an interview with Phyllis Ramsden and historian Dorothy Thompson, both based in Halifax. A local woman, Helena Whitbread then produced a book on the early Anne Lister in 1988, called, I Know My Own Heart, which had quite an impact. The Halifax Antiquarian Society (which John Lister had helped to form) held a day school in 1989 on Lister which I attended. It was the most disputatious day school I have ever attended, and I thought, there’s more to this woman than meets the eye. I went into the Halifax Archives and decided to write a history of the Anne Lister diaries, published in 1994 as Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax 1791-1840.

Q: Why did you decide to edit selections from her diaries into the volume Female Fortune, published in 1998, which covers 1833 to 1836?

I did a word count of the diaries using microfilm and found that they were double the initial estimate. I felt the only tactic as a historian was to take three or four samples of this four-million-word document. I looked at the very earliest diaries which Helena Whitbread hadn’t had access to, starting from when Lister was 15 and detailing her first lesbian relationship with Eliza Raine. I then decided to look at 1819 because I was teaching my students about the Peterloo Massacre, and then 1832, because it was the year of the Reform Act.

For Female Fortune, I focused on the 1830s. That period is interesting to me because it’s when Anne Lister is at her most powerful, after inheriting Shibden Hall, living there with Ann Walker. I wanted to look at the 1835 elections, and how she ran her estate.

Q: What persuaded you to go back after 25 years to work on a sequel, As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38 (2023)?  

Female Fortune received a fair amount of interest, including from the scriptwriter Sally Wainwright, who had grown up locally and was gripped by Anne Lister’s story. At that stage she was a jobbing scriptwriter and couldn’t get backing for a series about this little-known figure, and so both of us had to pursue other projects. Sally went on to become quite well known, and she returned to the idea. This time, when she pitched a series about Anne Lister’s life, the BBC said yes. What followed was Gentlemen Jack Series One which came out in 2019 on BBC One and HBO, introducing Lister to a new cohort of LGBTQ+ fans across the US and beyond.

Sally Wainwright (left) and Jill Liddington (right) in the Book Corner, 2022.

Q: As Good As A Marriage focuses on the relationship between Anne Lister and Ann Walker as one of its central subjects. What do these writings reveal about their “marriage”? 

From 1836, after Anne’s father and aunt died, the couple were on their own, with their servants, at Shibden Hall, and we can see the marriage up close and personal. It was a volatile marriage, as we can sense from the following quotations from the diaries. On Thursday, 17th August 1837, Anne wrote in code:

“Slept in the blue room [ie, didn’t sleep with Ann Walker], my mind seems comfortably made up. Ann has been preparing Crow Nest [her own house] and has wanted to be away from here. [Shibden] for a long time. How lucky I have not to have introduced her to anyone [Anne was a consummate snob, and the fact she hadn’t introduced Ann Walker to anybody was vital] the sooner she goes, the better.”

Later that day: “She must make up her mind to go or stay. She ought to go properly [ie, decisively]. [The doctor] was right, I should have a great deal of trouble with her. Well, I shall suit myself. I can have excuse enough for being off anytime and letting her do her own way. But while she is with me, I must hold the rein tighter.”

When I first transcribed that, the colour drained from my face: you hold a rein tighter with a horse, it isn’t how you talk about your wife. However, the next day, Friday the 18th, Anne writes, again in code: “Slept with A [Ann], good kiss, [orgasm], she saying it did not tire her at all.” And on Saturday 19th: “Slept with Ann, and she lay down naked after washing, and stayed with me, I grubbling [caressing] her.”

How I interpret this shift is the volatility and complexity of this very unorthodox marriage documented in the diary. Anne Lister does use this coercive, harsh language about Ann Walker, but while she thinks and writes these things, she doesn’t do them. She’s often kind to Ann Walker, and vice versa. They look after each other when they fall ill, and there’s a loyalty there.

Q: What new insights do readers gain about Lister’s life as a landlord and entrepreneur from this latest selection from the diaries? 

One of the things that saddened and annoyed Ann Walker was that after breakfast, Anne Lister would be off to her estate and business contacts, leaving her (Ann) behind. Increasingly by the late 1830s, Anne Lister was almost more interested in Shibden and the legacy she would her leave in her estate than she was in Ann Walker.

Increasingly by the late 1830s, Anne Lister was almost more interested in Shibden and the legacy she would her leave in her estate than she was in Ann Walker.

Anne Lister spent her days attending to business, seeing her tenants to find out if they had paid their rent and how they voted in the 1837 election. Though the 1832 Act excluded women from voting (and that remained so till 1918), if you were a landowner with enfranchised tenants, you could check how your tenants voted. Anne Lister doorstepped her tenants rigorously, not allowing any of them to deviate from voting blue, (for the Tories later the Conservative Party) and then checking this in the poll book. Almost every one of her 30 enfranchised tenants voted Tory. So, politically, she was very active and far more powerful than one woman with one vote would have been.

She was also a scholar and read very widely, including in science. She was very interested in geology and read everything by leading geologist Charles Lyell. She kept up to date as far as she could, though women weren’t allowed to go to university, let alone to be members of the learned societies. She read engineering books to aid her in developing her coal mines, which were profitable. She had also inherited Northgate House in Halifax which she turned into a hotel and casino – in the 1830s, “casino” meant a social room with music and drinking rather than a place where you would lose your shirt over a game of cards.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Elizabeth O’Sullivan on Shutterstock.

Lesbian relationships in Britain were regulated and silenced for centuries, through the courts and though wider patriarchal structures. In an interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Caroline Derry speaks about research from her book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020) and what the portrayal of same-sex relationships in Agatha Christie’s novels reveals about attitudes towards homosexuality – and specifically lesbianism – in post-war Britain.

Caroline Derry will speak at a hybrid event hosted by LSE Library, Agatha Christie, lesbians, and criminal courts on Thursday 15 February at 6.00 pm.

Q: In your book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, you speak of lesbianism being silenced in upper-class British society “because of acute anxieties about female sexual autonomy.” Where did these anxieties stem from? 

Women’s autonomy posed a profound threat to patriarchal structures. Marriage, particularly for elite men, was central to maintaining those structures: transfer of property, inheritance, and control over their household all depended upon it. Legally, the wife’s existence was subsumed in her husband’s, giving him power over her property, actions, and sexuality. This was not only true in the 18th century, when the book begins; it persisted through the 19th century and has only slowly been dismantled over the past century and a half. For example, the legal rule that a man could not be convicted of raping his wife was finally abolished in 1991.

There was anxiety that if women ‘discovered’ lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined.

There was anxiety that if women “discovered” lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined. That was explicitly stated by lawmakers at various points in history. In 1811, Scottish judge Lord Meadowbank said that “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners”.  In 1921, judge and MP Sir Ernest Wild asserted in Parliament that “it is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing whatever to do with the other sex”. And the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed reform of the law on male homosexuality, spoke of lesbianism as damaging to “the basic unit of society”, marriage.

Q: Why do you write in Lesbianism and the Criminal Law that “Patriarchal oppression […] made the criminalisation of lesbianism almost redundant”? 

There were many other ways of regulating women’s lives and relationships that could offer more effective control and less public scandal. These included economic constraints: in the 18th and 19th centuries, married women of all classes had little or no legal control of their own money. Single women without private incomes were little better off. For example, servants’ employers regulated most aspects of their lives under threat of dismissal without a reference.

Social norms set strict limits for unmarried women’s behaviour and gave families a great deal of control over them – although this could sometimes be evaded, as we know from Anne Lister’s diaries! Religious regulation of moral conduct was important, while medicalisation became more significant from the 19th century. Lesbian relationships were pathologised as a symptom of mental illness and the consequences could be awful: an extreme example was the use of clitoridectomy by surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. In the 20th century, “treatments” included aversion therapies and even brain surgery. And until relatively recently, the courts themselves had the power to detain young women in “moral danger”.

Q: Although lesbianism may not have been strictly outlawed, you refer to a “regulation by silencing” of lesbianism within the British court systems. How did this operate? 

Legal silencing was based on the assumption that if women – particularly “respectable”, higher class, white, British women – were not told that lesbianism existed, they probably wouldn’t try it. Eighteenth-century models of sexuality assumed women craved men’s greater “heat”, while 19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire. It was unlikely that two passive and desireless creatures would discover lesbian sex for themselves.

19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire.

In the criminal courts, silencing worked in several ways. The most obvious was to avoid criminal prosecutions altogether, because court hearings are public and could be reported in the press. So, there has never been a specific offence criminalising sex between women (unlike sex between men, which was wholly illegal until 1967). However, when a prosecution did seem necessary, silencing could be maintained by choosing an offence which concealed the sexual element of the case. There is a long history of prosecutions for fraud where one partner presented as male (cases relevant to both lesbian and transgender history). In the 18th century, this was supposed financial fraud to obtain a “wife’s” possessions; in the later 19th and 20th centuries, making false statements on official documents. And throughout these periods, women have been brought before magistrates for disorderly behaviour and breach of the peace – although few records survive.

Q: What does analysis of the defamation case Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon (1810-1812) reveal about how legal discourses defined morality in relation to race and class? 

This Scottish case offers a really potent example of those discourses. A half-Scottish, half-Indian teenager, Jane Cumming, told her grandmother Lady Helen Cumming Gordon that her schoolmistresses were having a sexual relationship. Cumming Gordon urged other families to withdraw their daughters, forcing the school to close, and the teachers brought a defamation claim for their lost livelihood.

The court had to wrestle with difficult questions: could two middle-class women of good character have done what was alleged? If not, how did their accuser come to know of such things? At the initial hearings, the judge’s answer was that the story must been invented by a working-class maid. But when witness evidence was heard, it became apparent that the story originated with Jane Cumming. Attention then shifted to her early life in India. The climate, the supposedly immoral culture, her race, or – in a mixture of race and class discourses – the bad influence of “native’” servants were all blamed.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism. Greater awareness of the horrors of violence, corruption and exploitation by the East India Company made it difficult to present their activities as legitimate trading. Instead, a moral justification was claimed: that Indian people needed to be rescued from iniquity by the imposition of superior British law and standards, exemplified by virtuous British womanhood. Many of the judges and witnesses in this case had connections to India, so it is unsurprising that these discourses made a particularly powerful appearance here.

Q: What were the legal implications of the 1957 Wolfenden report for homosexual activity in Britain? What did the report (or its omissions) reveal about attitudes towards women’s sexuality? 

The Wolfenden Report recommended partially decriminalising sex between men, but barely acknowledged sex between women. The few mentions implied that lesbianism was “less libidinous” and thus less of a threat to public order. That was important because politically, equality for gay men through full decriminalisation was not attainable at that time. Wolfenden therefore took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law, and focusing on arguments specific to male homosexuality. It was successful: Parliament eventually implemented the recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Wolfenden […] took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law

Nonetheless, the Report was a watershed event in the legal regulation of lesbianism. Until then, the law had treated male and female sexuality as very different things. Wolfenden introduced the term “homosexuality” into law, and lesbianism became seen as “female homosexuality”. Combined with the Report’s characterisation of lesbians as less sexual than gay men, this meant that lesbianism was treated as a lesser variant of male homosexuality – an attitude that has never gone away.

Q: Was it remarkable that Agatha Christie included or suggested homosexuality in her novels? 

Yes and no. These were not issues that were generally discussed in polite conversation. At the same time, lesbian (and gay) people were a fact of life, even if not directly acknowledged. In 1950, most people knew of women living quietly living together like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd in A Murder is Announced. Christie walked a careful line in that book, portraying an intimate and deeply loving relationship but showing nothing explicitly sexual about it.

By 1971, when [Christie] wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society.

And of course, Christie was a rather more daring writer than people often realise: it’s unfair to treat her as a narrowly conservative author of formulaic novels. By 1971, when she wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society. But Christie was in any event happy to engage with difficult issues in her work, even quite taboo ones like child murderers.

Q: What insights do these portrayals provide into the criminal justice system’s attitudes to lesbianism in post-war England? 

Christie’s novels reflect wider middle-class attitudes at the specific times they were written, so they offer insights that we can’t get from court reports alone. They also come from a woman’s perspective rather than that of the elite men who mostly made the law, and gender does make a difference here. Men were convinced that respectable women did not know of such things, but women didn’t necessarily agree!

The novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings.

In particular, the novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings. If we look at medical, psychological and sexological work on women’s same-sex relationships in post-war Britain, the courts seem hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison. But Christie’s books show us that outside expert circles, attitudes were indeed decades behind the latest science. In other words, the courts were reflecting and contributing to mainstream opinions, not falling behind them.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: A still from the the episode, “A Murder is Announced” of the BBC Miss Marple series (1984 to 1992), adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple (left) and Paola Dionisotti as Miss Hinchcliffe (right). This image is reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” exception to UK Copyright law.

We had entered the uncanny valley, and everyone was naked.