Revisiting Anne Lister
When Dr Jill Liddington first published her book Female Fortune, presenting the diaries of Anne Lister between 1833 and 1836, it was the culmination of nearly a decade of her quiet work on the story of the wealthy landowner and industrialist, who once called Halifax’s Shibden Hall her home.
By the time of its release in 1998, there had been bubbles of interest in the first modern lesbian, as Lister is regarded, and her detailed personal diary – but nothing quite like the scale on which Lister is now known thanks to Yorkshire screenwriter Sally Wainwright and her TV production
Gentleman Jack.
As fans await the spring release of season two of the show, which stars Suranne Jones as Lister in 1834, Liddington is re-publishing the book which is said to have inspired Wainwright to write the show.
For the first time, it will be available as an e-book and Liddington hopes it will become more accessible to more people with better distribution networks, particularly in the United States but also across the world.
“That’s absolutely what we’re aiming for,” she says.
“Gentleman Jack reached millions of people and so many of those people said they loved the drama, thought Sally Wainwright was a fantastic writer and heard the series was inspired by her reading
Female Fortune. Many feel they’d like to read that book. So we need to make sure bookshops can meet that demand.”
Born in 1791, Lister was a pioneering mountaineer, intrepid traveller and entrepreneur. She was also a lesbian and engaged in a number of passionate relationships with women throughout her life – romantic interests that would almost certainly have been deemed transgressive in the society in which she lived.
Lister wrote a detailed diary of her daily life, leaving behind an estimated five million words in volumes now stored with the West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). Around a sixth of the entries were written in crypthand, a code of her own devising, which she used to describe her deepest emotions and private affairs.
Produced by BBC One and HBO and based on Lister’s diaries, series one of Gentleman Jack was set in 1832. It followed Lister’s life as she inherited her uncle’s fading estate, Shibden Hall, which she attempted to restore while beginning a romance with Ann Walker, played by Sophie Rundle.
The forthcoming episodes will pick up in Yorkshire in 1834 as all eyes turn to Lister and Walker as they set up home together at Shibden as wife and wife.
Since Liddington published her second edition of Female Fortune in 2019, much has changed. She wrote the preface when just four episodes of Gentleman Jack had been broadcast in the UK.
Visitor numbers to Halifax, and particularly Shibden Hall, increased dramatically after the show, thanks to what has been dubbed ‘the Gentleman Jack effect’. Those numbers are set to peak again next month, when a festival of events takes place across Calderdale to mark the 231st birthday of Lister.
One reason Lister’s story has resonated so widely, Liddington muses, is “that Sally Wainwright is a genius scriptwriter”. “I’ve probably watched everything she has written, not least because many of them are based near where I live, in West Yorkshire, and also because she’s just so highly skilled and talented.
“I think another reason is
that the Anne Lister story itself and the diaries themselves are absolutely magnificent. It’s like having a video recorder on the rooms of Shibden Hall and following Anne wherever she walked.
“It’s a very good oral history. The diaries record dialogue in such delicate detail.”
So comprehensive are the diaries, that in 2011 they were inscribed in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in recognition of their substantial cultural significance.
“The other compelling reason why Gentleman Jack and
Anne Lister are so magnetic for people,” Liddington continues, “is that it was a diary written by a lesbian, an LGBT woman, about a marriage – two women privately, secretly getting married in 1834 and living together at Shibden Hall and that makes it surely absolutely unique.”
Another major development since Liddington’s last Female Fortune edition has been the discovery of Ann Walker’s diary. Covering a short period from June 1834 to February 1835, the diary was found during research at WYAS’s Calderdale site in October 2020. Liddington discusses the find in the afterword of her latest edition of Female Fortune and explores how the diaries of Lister and Walker differ in the level of detail they offer.
“That discovery is really quite important because what we have now for eightand-half months is two diaries written by two women living in the same household in a private marriage each recording their thoughts,” Liddington says. “That in itself is quite unusual... For LGBT history, I think it’s is rare, possibly unique, to have this insight within a LGBT marriage.”
Liddington began working on Lister’s diaries in around 1990. Her interest had been sparked by an article about the scale of the diaries in The Guardian in 1984 and again by the work of historian Helena Whitbread, who decoded and transcribed Lister’s diaries and published books about her life.
Liddington’s focus was on the diaries covering the 1830s and after painstaking work poring over microfilm copies
throughout the 1990s, she published Female Fortune: The Anne Lister Diaries, 1833–36: Land, Gender and Authority
in 1998.
In 2001, Liddington met Wainwright, who she says had become gripped by Lister after reading the book. They began working on script proposals for a drama series, though the project was put on hold as Wainwright established herself as a scriptwriter and Liddington continued work at the University of Leeds, researching gender history.
“Clearly she hadn’t forgotten about it though,” Liddington says, “because in 2014, a decade and a half later, Sally was interviewed on Desert Island Discs... and my heart stopped.”
Liddington recalls how Wainwright chose Female Fortune as a book she wanted to take with her if she was ever stranded on a desert island.
“She hadn’t had the opportunity to work on the script or get a commission but I knew she absolutely hadn’t forgotten,” Liddington says. “That inspiration from Female Fortune
of Anne Lister’s diaries in the 1830s had continued to grip her and she got back in touch a couple of years later and we began to work together again.”
Through 2019 and 2020, the extent of the success of Gentleman Jack, and its global reach, became apparent to Liddington. “It just shows how difficult it is to predict the future,” she says.
“I had no idea when I was working the Anne Lister diaries back in the 1990s that this would happen…I feel proud that I laboured quietly and persistently.”