Anne Lister

At a time when many women sought husbands to ensure financial stability, Anne Lister was looking for a wife. She was also writing thousands of pages of diaries, including sections written in code about her relationships.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Even if
you are not a fan of Regency fiction, you're probably

(00:21):
familiar with this whole idea of a woman who is
in search of a husband, either because her family doesn't
have any money, or because the money they do have
is all settled on a male relative, leaving nothing for
the families women. It's such a running theme in fiction
that's either from or about the whole Regency era that

(00:42):
it's easy to start imagining that every upper class woman's
life worked that way. So today we're going to talk
about a woman whose life defied that whole convention. Her
name was Anne Lister, and she was not looking for
a husband at all. She was looking for a wife.
And Lister was also a prolific diarist. She wrote more

(01:02):
than six thousand pages and four million words over her lifetime,
and about a sixth of those words were written in code.
And these coded sections she wrote about her relationships with
other women so frankly and with so much detail that
when these coded sections were first decoded, people wondered if
they were a hoax. It probably didn't help. But in

(01:23):
addition to all of the sexually explicit parts, the lives
of Anne and her social and romantic circles are really
really full of drama. It's like if Jane Austen met
Sarah Waters. So we are not going to get into
the details of Anne's sex life, but heads up that
if this episode piques your interest and you decide to
go read her diaries for yourself, you will learn a

(01:44):
lot a lot about it. Also just a heads up
that later on this episode we have a brief mention
of a rape. And Lester was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire,
on April third sev Her parents were Jared me Lister
and Rebecca Battle. Ann's father had served with the British
in the American Revolutionary War, and Anne was one of

(02:07):
six children, four boys and two girls. The Listers are
part of the Landed Gentry, and Jeremy's older brother, James,
had inherited the estate of Shibden Hall. He was living
there with his and Jeremy's sister, who was also named Anne.
There are a lot of Ann's in this story. Shibden
Hall had an income from rents on the cottages and

(02:29):
the farms that were part of the estate, and this
was large enough of an income that the family did
not have to work, but not large enough to support
a particularly lavish lifestyle. Apart from not having to work,
An's immediate family didn't have much money of their own,
and three brothers were next in line to inherit Shibden Hall,
but Anne herself was not expecting any kind of inheritance

(02:52):
When she left her boarding school in eighteen o four.
It was her aunt Anne who was paying her way.
And boarding school was the Mannor School in York, and
that is where she had her first romantic relationship, which
was with another student named Eliza Rain And and Eliza
shared an attic room at the school that was nicknamed
the Slope. The rest of the school's boarding students were

(03:16):
housed in a dormitory, and the reason for Anne and
Eliza being housed in the attic is not specifically documented,
but there are some likely reasons. For Anne. It was
probably because of money. The school's other boarding students were
generally much wealthier than she was, and it's also possible
that the school's staff wanted to keep Anne separate from

(03:37):
the other girls because of her behavior. She was stubborn
and rebellious and an unladylike tomboy. This whole making her
live in the attic thing because she didn't have any
money reminds me of a Little Princess starring Shirley Temple. Uh, yeah,
that one the shows up in various places. It's almost trophy. Yeah, well,

(03:58):
I think that that's part of the reason why were like,
are these diaries real? In addition to women definitely wouldn't
write about this stuff. There's the kids are living in
the attic because they don't have any money. So meanwhile,
Eliza was the daughter of an Indian woman and an
English doctor who had served with the British East India Company.

(04:19):
Her parents had gotten married in India, but their marriage
wasn't registered back in Britain, so Eliza and her sister
Jane were both considered to be illegitimate. Eliza was wealthy,
so the money thing was not why she was in
the attic. She was probably housed in the attic due
to a combination of racism and concerns about her supposedly

(04:40):
out of wedlock birth. Living together in the slope and
and Eliza developed an intense friendship that evolved into a
romantic relationship. After about six months, they had exchanged rings
and promised to marry one another after they finished school.
They also worked out a code that combined mathematical and
zodiac symbols with Latin and Greek letters so that they

(05:03):
could write each other love letters without being discovered. It
was really probably Eliza, who already spoke multiple languages, that
created the code itself, and would later use this code
to write all the details, I mean really all of
them about her relationships with other women in her diary.
After Anne and Eliza had been together for about two years,

(05:26):
someone intercepted a package that one of them sent to
the other, and their relationship was at that point discovered.
Anne was immediately asked to leave the school and told
that she could only come back after Eliza had left.
So Anne went back home to Halifax, where she was
tutored by the Reverend Samuel Knight. But this physical separation

(05:46):
didn't stop an Analyza's relationship. They kept writing each other letters,
this time without raising anybody's suspicions. Eliza also came to
stay with Anne for every school break and Ann's first
entry in her first diary, which is stated August eleventh
of eighteen oh six, is from the end of one
of these visits that began simply Eliza left us. By

(06:08):
the autumn of eighteen o eight, Anne was getting restless.
She was seventeen at that point, and she had become
a lot more flagrant and public in her stubborn tomboyishness.
She had also started giving flute lessons to an unmarried
woman named Maria Alexander, and this was a connection that
her family did not think was appropriate. Maria was over

(06:29):
thirty and her unmarried older brothers were also living at home.
Anne was also openly flirtatious with Maria, including in front
of Eliza when she took her along on one of
these flute lesson visits. In addition to disregarding Eliza's feelings
and all of this, and also started more and more
wilfully disregarding social expectations about how girls should behave. She

(06:52):
asked to go to Portsmouth with the Alexander's without a chaperone,
on a trip that would also involve Maria's older, unmarried
read brothers. She ignored her curfew and she visited the
Alexander's even after her family had forbidden her to do so.
When her family finally gave her permission to spend two
nights with the Alexander's over New Year's Eve, she stayed

(07:14):
there for two weeks. And it wasn't just with the
Alexander's that Anne willfully defied what was expected of a
young woman. She started a neighborhood scandal after she went
with a Captain Burn to his chamber alone on more
than one occasion to look at his pistols. AND's behavior
had become so notorious that people in the neighborhood started

(07:35):
calling her gentleman Jack. So through all of this, and
was still having a relationship with Eliza, and her behavior
was causing Eliza more and more distress. And this was
particularly true after Anne told Eliza that twenty one was
much too young for the two of them to live
together and they should wait until they were more like seven.

(07:57):
They were both seventeen at this point, so Anne was
basically saying, we'll live together in a decade. Eliza's letters
to Anne at this point became increasingly anxious and sorrowful,
and by eighteen o nine, she was asking for reassurance
that the two of them would ever be together at all.
In eighteen ten, a tragedy struck the Lister family that

(08:17):
changed Anne's life significantly. We're going to discuss that after
we first paused for a little sponsor break. In January
of eighteen ten, Anne Lister's oldest brother, John died during
an influenza outbreak. John had been Anne's closest sibling, and

(08:38):
they'd already lost two of their other brothers. So instead
of being one of six siblings and was now one
of three, with only her brother Samuel and her sister
Marian still living. John's death meant that Anne was now
second in line to inherit Shibden Hall, rather than third.
She started to consider what it would mean if she

(08:58):
inherited the estate and what she would need to be
able to do to run it herself. To do so
in the lifestyle she wanted, she would need more money
than Shibden Hall could provide. The solution was to marry well,
and for Anne that meant marrying a rich and ideally
noble woman. Eliza finished her studies at the Manor School

(09:20):
that same year, and she went to live with a
cousin in Halifax to wait for the day that she
and Anne could start a home together with Eliza no
longer at the school, and went back. It's possible that
Anne was still thinking that she could make Eliza her wife.
After all, Eliza was an heiress. She really had a
lot of money that was going to come to her
when she turned twenty one. But not long after all

(09:42):
of this, when Anne became second in line to inherit
Shibden Hall, Eliza's family experienced its own tragedy. Eliza's sister
Jane had gotten married to Lieutenant Henry Bolton and moved
back to India with him, but he had abandoned her.
Her inheritance had become his when they married, so she

(10:02):
had nothing of her own. Arrangements were made for her
to come back to Halifax, but she had to travel
for months on a ship unaccompanied. She was imprisoned after
arriving in France because she couldn't prove her British citizenship.
After all of this, she arrived in England pregnant with
a child that could not have been her husband's that

(10:23):
was almost certainly the result of a rape. So now
that she was second in lines to inherit shipd in Hall,
and started to care a lot more about other people's
opinions of her. This included the opinions of two of
the day students at the Manor School. One was Isabella Northcliffe,
who is referred to as Tib in Ann's journals. Isabella

(10:44):
and Anne had started a relationship, but then Isabella had
had introduced Anne to Marianna Belcomme. Of all of the
women and was involved with during her lifetime, she was
probably the most in love with Marianna and worried about
how Eliza's so called fallen sister would affect Marianna and
Isabella's opinions of her. Anne kept her engagement to Eliza

(11:08):
secret from Marianna and Isabella, and she didn't tell Eliza
about her romantic involvement with the two young women back
at school, but it was obvious to Eliza that Anne
was forming new relationships and that she was excluding her
from them. When Anne visited Marianna or Isabella, Eliza was
not invited. As Eliza approached her twenty first birthday, which

(11:31):
was when she would actually receive her inheritance, she found
herself with her own suitor. This was Captain John Alexander,
who insisted that this had nothing to do with her money.
At Whether that's true, I'm not really sure, but Eliza
still considered herself to be Anne's wife. She was also

(11:51):
increasingly worried, though, that Anne was never going to make
good on her promise that they would live together one day,
so she wrote to Anne to get reassurance about this
their future together and didn't answer. Instead, Anne, who could
be pretty manipulative in her relationships, sent letters to Eliza's guardian,
William Duffin, as well as to Captain Alexander, and gave

(12:14):
each of them a distorted version of what was going on.
The result was that the Captain went to William Duffin
to demand to marry Eliza, but Duffin refused. Even though
none of this was any of her own doing, Eliza
found herself branded as a temptress and she was ostracized.
She was so distraught over everything that she took a

(12:36):
trip to Bristol to try to recover. Meanwhile, Anne went
on her own trip to Bath with Isabella and Marianna
until it became clear that she just did not have
the money or the social connections to keep up with
two of them there. So Anne went back home on
June nine thirteen, as twenty two year old Anne was
on her way home she learned that her last surviving brothers,

(12:59):
Sam Mule, had drowned. Anne was now the one who
would inherit Shibden Hall, and it became even more important
to her to have a respectable life and reputation. Although
her brother had died during military service, he had drowned
on a pleasure boat. It was not considered to be
a very noble or distinguished death, and Anne thought that

(13:19):
she needed to make the family respectable again and to
conduct herself in a way that would bring honor to
the estate of Shibden Hall, and started cutting ties with Eliza.
She didn't invite Eliza to Sam's funeral or answer her
repeated requests to return her letters and gifts and engagement ring,
and eventually invited Eliza on a trip that she was

(13:41):
taking with Isabella, but Eliza got really sick early into
the journey and went home again once she was better.
Eliza was distraught over Ann's rejection, and not long after
she got home, she had an unexpected visit from her
sister Jane, who by this time was struggling with both
alcohol is um and tuberculosis and was supporting herself through

(14:03):
sex work. Jane also seemed to be emotionally unstable, and
when Eliza started to look for a place in London
to have her committed, gossip began to spread that she
was doing all of this for her own personal gain.
Eliza went through cycles of depression and agitation until Marianna
Belcome asked her father, who ran an asylum, to intervene.

(14:25):
Eliza was temporarily committed, and from that point she was
in and out of asylums until eighteen sixteen, when she
was declared insane. Eliza spent the rest of her life
in Marianna Belcolm's father's asylum, and she died there in
eighteen sixty at the age of sixty eight. She had
a will. Originally she had left everything to Anne, but

(14:45):
she had rewritten it to leave everything to her former suitor,
Captain Alexander, who she eventually seemed to regret not having married.
But this new will was ruled invalid and so what
was left of her fortune was claimed by the Crown.
As for Eliza's sister, her son died in eighteen seventeen
at the age of six, and in eighteen nineteen her

(15:07):
husband was killed in action, even though he had abandoned her.
Jane was still legally his wife, so what was left
of her fortune reverted back to her. This was unfortunately
not in time to help her, however. James tuberculosis was
quite advanced at that time, and she died in November
of eighteen nineteen, only a few months after her husband's death.

(15:29):
As all of this was happening with Eliza being committed,
she obviously lived much longer after that. Anne suffered a
rejection of her own. Although she had never stopped having
physical relationships with other women, she was still passionately in
love with Marianna Belcolm. She had been making plans for
the two of them to have a life together, but

(15:49):
in March of eighteen sixteen, Marianna's family found a suitor
for her. They arranged things so that Anne, who was visiting,
would be staying with neighbors instead of at their house,
and then they greeted Marianna away to get married to
Charles Lawton. Anne was devastated. She made Marianna promise that
they would still live together once Charles died, and since

(16:11):
he was twenty years older than Marianna was, she hoped
that that was going to happen. Soon. In the meantime,
the two women did not stop seeing each other, and
Anne even lived with Marianna and Charles for the first
six months of their marriage. When Charles realized that Marianna
and Anne were physically involved, he banished Anne from the house,
but eventually he did allow the two women to see

(16:32):
one another again. This didn't work out so well for
Anne though. Later on in her life, she contracted a
sexually transmitted infection for Marianna and then passed it on
to at least one other partner. She eventually went to
Paris to try to seek medical treatment for this infection,
but there was not really a cure for whatever it
was at this point, so she probably carried it for

(16:53):
the rest of her life. After all of this drama,
Anne's life started to settle down a little. We're going
to talk more about that after we have another little
sponsor break. And Lister never completely forgave herself for betraying Eliza,

(17:14):
and she visited her in the asylum from time to
time until her death. After her own heartbreak with Marianna,
and started to take a more practical approach to finding
a wife. She started looking for somebody who would have
enough money to support the lifestyle that she wanted, but
not necessarily someone who provoked that same all consuming love
that she had had for Marianna. She also became more

(17:36):
practical in the rest of her affairs. By eighteen seventeen,
she had moved into Shibdon Hall with her aunt Anne
and uncle James, and she wanted to prove to them
that she was capable of managing the estate herself. Even
though she was the heir. There were other branches of
the Lister family, and she wanted to rule out any
possibility that the estate would wind up settled on them instead.

(17:59):
Anne had been keeping her diaries on a messy collection
of paper scraps until this point, but she abandoned that
in eighteen seventeen and started writing in large bound journals,
meticulously dating her entries and recording all of her daily
habits AND's daily writing included the weather, how she had slept,
what she was learning. She was determined to continue her education,

(18:20):
and so she got up at five am every day
to study, and then she kept records of all of
her progress in her diary. She also used these diaries
to keep up with what was going on at Shibdon
Hall in the surrounding neighborhood. She kept track of all
her purchases and her interactions with tenants and workers. She
made notes about local gossip and quarrels among the gentry.

(18:41):
She also noted what was going on in the rest
of the world, the same way that Samuel Peep's diary
created an important record of life in London and major
world events from sixteen sixty to sixteen sixty nine, and
Lister's diary really created a record of Halifax in the
greater world from eighteen seventeen to eighteen party. She also
became a lot more reserved in her behavior and her

(19:05):
habits while continuing to defy gender expectations. She dressed in black,
which wasn't a color that women typically wore unless they
were in mourning, but it was a color that men
often wore while traveling, and was sort of patterning her
wardrobe around the idea of a distinguished conservative gentleman traveler.

(19:25):
She didn't wear trousers, though these were black dresses that
had a somewhat more masculine air. She also made it
a point not to gossip about people anymore, so like
that business where she was writing misleading letters to people
to try to get away like that really cut a
lot back. I'm so good, I'm so delighted to hear it. Uh.

(19:46):
When she was about twenty six and attracted the attentions
of a Mr Montague, but she did not reciprocate. On
January nine one, she wrote in her diary that she
had burned all of his farewell verse is so that
quote no trace of any man's admiration may remain. She
went on to say, quote I love and only love

(20:07):
the fairer sex, and thus beloved by them. In turn,
my heart revolts from any other love than theirs. In
July of eighteen twenty two, and and her aunt took
a tour of North Wales and they visited past podcast
subjects Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Ladies of Longcothland.
On the twenty three she met Sarah Ponsonby at Plasknewid,

(20:30):
which was their home. Eleanor was ill that day and
was asleep during aunt's visit. She exchanged some letters with
the Ladies of Longcothlind later on after she returned home.
In January of eighteen twenty six, as uncle James died
and an inherited Shibden Hall under the condition that her
aunt Anne and her father could still live on the

(20:51):
property and collect portions of the rent, and Anne continued
to manage the domestic world of the household. While Anne
was responsible for the day to day matters of managing
the estate, which she did with the help of a
steward for the agricultural work and an agent for the
industrial work, she also got to work trying to improve
the estate. She had two goals in mind, to provide

(21:13):
the family with an ongoing comfortable income and to situate
the estate so that it would be worth more when
it was passed on to another air. Her extensive self
education over the past decade or so really paid off
in this She had developed a working knowledge of science, engineering,
and business, as well as the industries that were growing
up in the area, including cold timber and stone. She

(21:36):
also began traveling extensively all over Europe as she continued
to look for a suitable wife. She had no trouble
finding love interests. When she met someone she thought might
return her interest, she would bring up a book or
a play that had subtle or overt themes of love
between women and see how the other woman responded, and
this led to a lot of flings, but not really

(21:58):
to any long term attachment. It was back home in
Halifax that Ane Lister finally found a woman to spend
the rest of her life with, and that woman was
Ann Walker, an heiress who lived on a nearby estate.
Her method of finding potential love interests is like the
modern equivalent would be walking up to somebody and and

(22:19):
asking them whether they like Teaket and Sarah like. This
is sort of the regency equivalent of gator conversation. In
eighteen thirty two, and Lester had started working with an
architect named John Harper to try to improve Shipton Hall's
architecture and its grounds. She was a really avid walker,

(22:40):
so she had added a wilderness garden complete with waterfalls
and a small chamiere which is a that ryf hut,
and this hut became her retreat while she can while
she courted and Walker. And Walker, for her part, was
wary of a Lister, and Lister made no secret of
the fact that she was interested in and Walker's money.
And Anne Walker knew and Lister was not in love

(23:03):
with her. But by eighteen thirty four, both of the
ants were living at Shibden Hall, and on Easter Sunday
of that year they exchanged rings with one another and
then took communion together at Holy Trinity Church in good
ram Gate in York. They lived from that point on
as a married couple, including renting a pew together in
the front row of their parish church. And Walker's money

(23:27):
funded a lot of the work that Anne Lister was
planning at Shibden Hall over the next few years. Improvements
included a Norman tower to house the library, a grand
staircase in the entryway, and a set of tunnels so
that the household staff could get from place to place
without being seen. And Lister also decided to try her
hand managing a coal mining operation rather than leasing the

(23:49):
rights to someone else and earning money that way, and
Walker's money funded the sinking of two coal pits on
Shipden Hall's property. The two ants also continued travel as
much as their time and Anne Walker's money allowed, and
Lister was really the one driving these trips. She had
way more wonder less than Anne Walker did. These weren't

(24:10):
laid back pleasure trips either. Their travels were daring and unconventional,
and Lister was an avid mountaineer, and she summitted multiple
peaks in the Pyrenees. They took horseback journeys into territory
that was really more often home to military units than
two unescorted ladies. In eighteen thirty six, and Lister's father died.

(24:31):
She was at that point in control of ship in Hall.
I think this means that her aunt Anne had also died,
but I could not find confirmation of when that happened.
In eighteen thirty seven, the two hands wrote out wills
to each other, and each of them left the other
one all of her possessions and wealth, on the condition
that the surviving and never married. In eighteen thirty nine,

(24:54):
they left on a two year trip through Scandinavia, the
Low Countries and Russia. The following year, and Lester contracted
some kind of fever while touring the Caucusus. In her
last diary entry, dated August thirteenth, eighteen forty, she doesn't
mention anything odd about her health, but on September twenty
she died at the age of forty nine. She had

(25:17):
apparently requested to be buried at home in Halifax, so
Anne Walker had her body embalmed and accompanied it on
a six month journey home, and Lester was finally buried
at Halifax Parish Church. Their relationship had not always been
particularly happy, right I just I imagine Ann Walker just

(25:38):
kind of gritting her teeth through some of this travel
when she really wanted to be at home with their
nice garden and the waterfall in the library at Shipton Hall.
But Lester's death and this long journey home with her
body really took a toll on Ann Walker's health. In
eighteen forty two, her sister and a doctor conspired to
have her declared insane and admitted to an asylum so

(26:01):
that they could take over her fortune, including Shipton Hall.
This was temporary in terms of the ownership of Shipton Hall.
When Anne Walker died in eighteen fifty four, the estate
reverted back to the Lister family. An Lister's diaries stayed
in the family library until the late nineteenth century. John
Lister's parents had inherited the estate when he was eight,

(26:24):
and he had been publishing transcriptions of the plain language
portions of Anne's diaries in the Halifax Guardian. With the
help of Arthur Barrell, he cracked the code and discovered
what Anne had been writing about all that time. John
Lister was horrified. I mean, I can't stress that they
are really explicit. Uh. And apart from there being really explicit,

(26:49):
homosexuality between men was illegal in Britain at the time,
and although homosexuality between women wasn't specifically outlawed, it was
highly stigmatized. So John M. Lister thought about burning these
diaries when he realized what was in them. Ultimately, I
think fortunately he locked them away again. It's been speculated

(27:11):
that John Lister also had relationships as other men, and
that this desire to keep the diaries hidden was partly
by motivated by self preservation and basically being afraid of
outing himself. Until the mid twentieth century, most of the
archivists and historians who examined Anne Lister's diaries stayed away
from their explicit content in their published work. Dr Phillis

(27:34):
Ramsden worked with the journals in the nineteen sixties and
wound up mostly establishing a chronology and focusing on Anne's travels.
A graduate student named Vivian Ingham was part of this
work as well, and was working on a PhD dissertation,
but she died before that work was complete. By the
nineteen eighties, at least some of the stigma surrounding lesbian

(27:55):
relationships was starting to fade, and in historian Helena Whitbread
published I Know My Own Heart The Diaries of En
Lister eighteen forty. This volume included both decoded and transcribed
material from the diaries. She published a second collection in

(28:15):
so these two volumes obviously do not cover the entire
diary that is thousands and thousands of pages, but they
did make some of the decoded material widely available for
the first time, and really parts of the rest of
it as well. Even when she was not writing in code.
An Lister's handwriting is really hard to read. There are
a lot of scans of pages from the diary on

(28:38):
the internet. It is very difficult. And on top of
the very difficult to read parts, she used a lot
of a lot a lot of made up abbreviations, so
it could be hard even when you could read what
she was saying to figure out exactly what she was
talking about. The thing too, to consider, right when you're
looking at someone's diaries and we've established that she really
notated everything, is that a lot of it is probably

(28:59):
very boring weather and had like transaction talk, so why
probably most people would not want to read a list
of the temperatures in Halifax, of course, so several years.
Uh an Lister's diaries are one of the longest in
the English language, and they demonstrate how she really was

(29:21):
ahead of her time. She successfully managed and improved on
Shibdon Hall at a time when it was not common
at all for a woman to be the head of
a household. In this way, she held her own and
the overwhelmingly male dominated and cut throat coal industry, she
found a way to live with a lot more independence
and autonomy than many women, even other wealthy white women,

(29:42):
were able to do at this time. The diaries also
show how she was ahead of her time in terms
of her relationships with other women, to the point that
she's sometimes described as the first modern lesbian. There have
obviously been same sex relationships throughout recorded history, but the
idea of a lesbian identity, or the more general idea

(30:04):
that having relationships with someone of the same sex is
intrinsically connected to who you are as a person, is
way more recent in the Western world. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the word lesbianism was first used in
writing to describe homosexual attraction between women in eighteen seventy,
with lesbian first used in the same way twenty years later,

(30:26):
and using the word lesbian to describe a person instead
of an attraction or a sex act is even later
than that that's first used in writing in nine five,
and that same thing is true for most of the synonyms.
So sapphis um meaning homosexual relations between women dates back
to eighteen ninety, but sapphist didn't arrive until the nineteen twenties,

(30:47):
and even then it indicated a dysfunction more than an identity.
All of this was decades after Anne Lister's death in
eighteen forty, even though she was living before language real
existed to describe herself, and Lister did seem to have
a sense that her attraction to other women was an
intransic part of herself. Her diaries document a lot of

(31:10):
self reflection and introspection about why she was attracted to
women and what that meant about her, and is also
completely accepting of who she is and these diaries, although
she does document some incidents of being harassed for what
she was wearing or how she lived her life, this
is really different from a lot of other early lesbian literature,
Like if you read The Well of Loneliness, which is

(31:32):
generally marked as the first lesbian novel in English, it
is tragic and sad and full of just a lot
of self doubt and shame, and there is none of
that and and Lister's life, Uh, probably because she lived
before lesbian was really an identity, because like the coalescence
of that identity was happening at the same time as

(31:53):
a lot of criminalization was happening in stigma, and when
those two things like came about in parallel with each other,
that meant you can see it's affect on people's um
like sense of themselves and mental health and all of
that in early lesbian literature. This sets and and her
diaries apart from some of the other women that we've

(32:14):
talked about on the show who definitely had long term
and loving relationships with other women but lived before the
idea of a lesbian identity really existed in Western culture.
So examples would be the aforementioned Ladies of Lang Laugham
and Jane Adams. Yeah, Jane adams life overlapped the evolution
of lesbian identity, but this isn't something that she wrote

(32:36):
about in any of her surviving journals or papers or anything.
So we know a lot less about how she conceived
of herself. It's easy to assume what she would have
thought about herself. But we also have other examples of
people we do know about who lived at a time
when an identity was evolving and we're like, I don't

(32:58):
feel like that word applies to me. Like we that
with Sylvia Rivera and the word transgender. She was like,
I'm not sure that's me. I have another person on
my short list for a future episode maybe who was
a vaudeville female impersonator that similarly lived at a time
when gay became like more coalesced into an identity for men,

(33:18):
and was similarly like, I don't think that's me, even
though he exclusively had relationships with their men for his
whole life. So anyway, because of all this, Inleven, the
United Kingdom formally recognized the historical and cultural value of
Anlister's diaries and they were added to the UNESCO Memory
of the World Register. Their entry on the UK Memory

(33:40):
of the World Register page reads, in part quote, the
diaries include a wealth of information about politics, business, estate management, religion, education,
and reading, science, medicine, travel, and local and national events,
as this important area of Yorkshire experienced the rapid effects
of the Industrial Revolution and seen from the viewpoint of

(34:01):
an extremely well educated and pioneering should probably say woman here,
but there seems to be a word missing. It is
her comprehensive and painfully honest account of lesbian life and
reflections on her nature, however, which have made these diaries unique.
They have shaped and continued to shape the direction of
UK gender studies and women's history. Her story reminds me

(34:25):
a lot of the same exact kinds of um squabbles
and pettyback biting that I lived through in middle school,
but with much higher stakes we were We were not
having people confined two asylums in middle school when we
were sending snipy backbiting, mean girl letters to each other. Yeah,

(34:47):
I think where I I have a moment where I
turn on analystic is the letter where she kind of
contrives some some poor things to happen to Eliza by
sort of betraying her and making stuff up. Yeah she could. Yeah,
I also have some listener mail. I'm so delighted. Can

(35:09):
you share it? Sure? Can? This email comes from Liz
and it follows our Unearthed and twenty seventeen episodes and
the part where we mentioned a privy at Paul Revere House. Uh,
and she writes, Uh. The real version of events is
actually cooler, in my opinion than the story the media
picked up and misreported. This is another correction about that

(35:31):
the privy we found actually dates to the seventeenth century,
at least a hundred years prior to Paul Revere's residence
at nineteen North Square in Boston's North End. It's also
associated not with the building Paul Revere inhabited, but the
neighboring house now called the Pierce Hitchborne House. The City
of Boston Archaeology program was originally contacted about doing an
archaeological assessment of the side yard next to the house,

(35:55):
as they will be doing some construction in future years.
We initially we're just looking to see what was on there,
expecting to find only eighteenth century deposits associated with Paul
Revere's cousin Nathaniel Hitchborne, who occupied the house from s
eighty one, and later nineteenth century deposits from its later owners.
Imagine our surprise when we found the first intact seventeenth

(36:16):
century deposit in Boston found for several decades. Because Boston
has such a long occupation and therefore an equally long
history of construction, that is not very common to find
undisturbed seventeenth century sites. Every time a building has renovated,
a trench's duck, a privy moved, etcetera, there's disturbance and
earlier deposits usually resulting in mixed fills that can't really

(36:37):
tell us too much definitive information about the people who
lived there. So any intact seventeenth century deposit in Boston
is a reason for excitement. This particular site may be
associated with Moses Pierce, a glazier who bought the original house,
and may also be associated with John Jeff's who built
the Paul Revere House in sixteen eighty UM. She sent

(36:58):
some pictures UH from the dig. So basically, the thing
that we described as the privy at the Paul Revere
House UH is not actually at the Paul Revere's house,
but Paul Revere's house is older than Paul Revere UH
living in the area, and also explains why I didn't
find any of this when I was doing that episode.

(37:20):
So The way that our unearthed episodes work is that
I keep up with news about um all kinds of
unearthed things throughout the year, and then when I can't
find when there's not a lot of clear information or
a link to an original paper in the original news reporting,
I try to find other stuff. But when I tried
to find other stuff about the Paul Revere Privy, I

(37:41):
was searching for Paul Revere Privy, which is not who's
privy it was. So I basically found a whole bunch
of inaccurate news articles, all confirming this idea that it
was the Paul Revere Privy and saying nothing else substantive
about it. So thank you Liz for sending us all
kinds of information and pictures about that. If you would

(38:01):
like to write to us about this or any other
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I have done together, and you will find an archive

(38:22):
of every episode we have ever done. So you can
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