Biography
Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters
Anna Marie Roos (Bodleian Library, £25)
IN 2012, four heavy, dusty, uncatalogued boxes holding papers, letters, notebooks, drawings of shells and snails and a few beautifully engraved copper plates were unearthed in an Oxford library. This long-forgotten material provided the source for Anna Marie Roos’s new book about two extraordinary late-17thcentury artists, Susanna and Anna Lister, daughters of the doctor and natural historian Martin Lister.
Now, for the first time, the sisters are acknowledged as the illustrators of their father’s famous Historiae Conchyliorum; for women to do such work at that period was exceptional.
Lister’s three-volume masterpiece was the authority on molluscs as late as the 19th century and it is still worldrenowned for its thoroughness, beauty and taxonomy. Pre-dating that of Linnaeus, it was first printed by Lister himself in 1685 and, thereafter, reissued several times.
The 1692 edition contained no fewer than 1,067 engraved illustrations; it was almost entirely visual. Every plate was engraved by Lister’s daughters after their own drawings—for such anatomical accuracy, the author explains, they must sometimes have used microscopes as they drew.
However, as in many early women’s histories, the sisters’ lives remain shadowy—certainly in comparison with their father’s. Unlike him, they are not the subject of any known portraits and there are no surviving diaries, so we can only imagine how they worked in the family’s London house—when, where and for how many hours. This is, however, tantalising.
We do know that they began engraving when they were teenagers and that they learned the technique from a book. Fortunately, they incised their initials into the copper plates (one early illustration by Susanna shows hers printed back-to-front —a rookie engraving error, but one that brings her to life).
Another charming detail is that the sisters used sewing pins to attach reference drawings to paper sheets, perhaps because they were to hand.
The author makes the most of what information there is and, with the help of generous and beautiful colour illustrations, lets the sisters’ achievement speak for them and their artistic talents. She also gives a good account of their father’s work.
The result is a fascinating glimpse of 17th-century female artistic endeavour—unstinting, unpaid and, until now, unsung. Philippa Stockley