SYMHC Classics: Anne Lister

This 2018 episode covers Anne Lister, who was looking for a wife at a time when many women sought husbands to ensure financial stability. 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The second season of the TV show Gentleman
Jack has been airing on HBO or on BBC One
for folks in the UK. Back when the first season
came out in we heard from a lot of people
that they first learned about the show's protagonist and lister
from our January episode of the podcast. The first season

(00:25):
of this show, uh, which again is called Gentleman Jack,
it kind of skipped over and listens earlier life, which
is a big part of this episode, and those early
years really revealed and listener to be a complicated person.
I can't really say how season two aligns with the
real Analyst though, because even though this Saturday classic is

(00:46):
coming out towards the very end of this season, we
are recording it when only one episode has come out
in the US so far, and I haven't even watched
that one yet. Dundon, who knows holp you a surprise.
We hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and

(01:14):
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 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,

(01:34):
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 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

(01:55):
not looking for a husband at all. She was looking
for a wife. And Lister was also a prolific diarist.
She wrote more 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

(02:16):
with so much detail that when these coded sections were
first decoded, people wondered if they were a hoax. It
probably didn't help it. In 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,

(02:39):
but heads up that if this episode piques your interest
and you decide to go read her diaries for yourself,
you will learn a lot a lot about it. Also
just a heads up that later on this episode we
have a brief mention of a rape. And Lister was
born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, on April third. Her parents

(03:00):
were Jeremy Lister and Rebecca Battle. Ann's father had served
with the British in the American Revolutionary War, and Anne
was one of 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

(03:21):
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 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

(03:45):
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. When she left for 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

(04:08):
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 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

(04:30):
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 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

(04:50):
starring Shirley Temple. Uh, yeah, that one that shows up
in various places. It's almost trophy. Yeah. Well, I think
that that's part of the reason why people were like,
are these diaries reeled? 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,

(05:14):
Eliza was the daughter of an Indian woman and an
English doctor who had served with the British East India Company.
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

(05:34):
the attic. She was probably housed in the attic due
to a combination of racism and concerns about her supposedly
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.

(05:58):
They also worked out a code that come find mathematical
and zodiac symbols with Latin and Greek letters so that
they 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

(06:19):
of them about her relationships with other women in her diary.
After Anne and Eliza had been together for about two years,
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.

(06:40):
So Anne went back home to Halifax, where she was
tutored by the Reverend Samuel Knight. But this physical separation
didn't stop, and an Eliza'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 and her first diary, which is stated

(07:01):
August eleven of eighteen oh six, is from the end
of one of these visits that began simply Eliza left us.
By 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

(07:23):
woman named Maria Alexander, and this was a connection that
her family did not think was appropriate. Maria was over
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

(07:45):
and all of this, and also started more and more
wilfully disregarding social expectations about how girls should behave. She
asked to go to Portsmouth with the Alexander's without a chaperone,
on a trip that would also involve Maria's older, unmarried brothers.
She ignored her curfew, and she visited the Alexander's even

(08:06):
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 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

(08:26):
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 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

(08:49):
after And 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. 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

(09:12):
two of them would ever be together at all. In
eighteen ten, a tragedy struck the Lister family that changed
Anne's life significantly. We're going to discuss that. After we
first paused for a little sponsor break in January of

(09:34):
eighteen ten, Ann Lister's oldest brother, John died during an
influenza outbreak. John had been Anne's closest sibling, and 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

(09:57):
to inherit Shibden Hall, rather than third. She started to
consider what it would mean if she 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.

(10:22):
Eliza finished her studies at the Manor School 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

(10:43):
twenty one. But not long after all 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

(11:05):
become his when they married, so she 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

(11:25):
not have been her husband's that was almost certainly the
result of a rape. So now that she was second
in line to inherit Shipden 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 Annt's journals. Isabella and Anne had

(11:49):
started a relationship, but then Isabella had had introduced Anne
to Marianna Belcolm. Of all of the women and was
involved with during her lifetime, she was probably the most
in love with Marianna. Anne worried about how Eliza's so
called fallen sister would affect Marianna and Isabella's opinions of her.

(12:10):
Anne kept her engagement to Eliza 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

(12:33):
her twenty first birthday, which 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, uh,
not really sure, but Eliza still considered herself to be
Anne's wife. She was also increasingly worried, though, that Anne

(12:57):
was never going to make good on her promise that
they would lived 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 each of them

(13:19):
a distorted version of what was going on. The result
was that the Captain went to William Duffin to demand
to marry Ealiza, 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 trip to

(13:41):
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, and was on her
way home she learned that her last surviving brother, Samuel,

(14:04):
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 she needed
to make the family respectable again and to conduct herself

(14:27):
in a way that would bring honor to the estate
of Shibden Hall. An 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
taking with Isabella, but Eliza got really sick early into

(14:49):
the journey and went home again once she was better.
Eliza was distraught over An's rejection, and not long after
she got home, she had an unexpected visit it from
her sister Jane, who by this time was struggling with
both alcoholism and tuberculosis and was supporting herself through sex work.
Jane also seemed to be emotionally unstable, and when Eliza

(15:12):
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. Eliza was
temporarily committed, and from that point she was in and

(15:34):
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 she had rewritten
it to leave everything to her former suitor, Captain Alexander,

(15:54):
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 husband
was killed in action. Even though he had abandoned her,

(16:15):
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.
As all of this was happening with Eliza being committed,

(16:37):
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
in March of eighteen sixteen, Marianna's family found a suitor
for her. They arranged things so that Anne, who was visiting,

(17:00):
would be staying with neighbors instead of at their house,
and then they secreted 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
he was twenty years older than Marianna was, she hoped
that that was going to happen soon. In the meantime,

(17:20):
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
one another again. This didn't work out so well for
Anne though. Later on in her life, she contracted a

(17:43):
sexually transmitted infection for Marianna and then pass 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
the rest of her life. After all of this drama,
Anne's life started to settle down a little. We're going

(18:04):
to talk more about that after we have another little
sponsor break and Lister never completely forgave herself for betraying Eliza,
and she visited her in the asylum from time to
time until her death. After her own heartbreak with Marianna,

(18:27):
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 would provoked that same all consuming
love that she had had for Marianna. She also became
more practical in the rest of her affairs. By eighteen seventeen,
she had moved into Shibdon Hall with her aunt Anne

(18:49):
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 wanted to rule out any possibility
that the estate would wind up settled on them instead.
Anne had been keeping her diaries on a messy collection
of paper scraps until this point, but she abandoned that

(19:11):
in eighteen seventeen and started writing in large bound journals,
meticulously dating her entries and recording all of her daily habits.
Anne's daily writing included the weather, how she had slept,
what she was learning. She was determined to continue her education,
and so she got up at five am every day
to study, and then she kept records of all of

(19:31):
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.
She also noted what was going on in the rest
of the world the same way that Samuel Peep's diary

(19:53):
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 forty. She also
became a lot more reserved in her behavior in her habits,
while continuing to defy gender expectations. She dressed in black,

(20:16):
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.
She didn't wear trousers, though these were black dresses that
had a somewhat more masculine air. She also made it

(20:38):
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.
When she was about twenty six and attracted the attentions
of a Mr. Montague, but she did not reciprocate on

(21:00):
January nine, eight twenty one, she wrote in her diary
that she had burned all of his farewell verses so
that quote no trace of any man's admiration may remain.
She went on to say, quote, I love and only
love the fairer sex, and thus beloved by them. In turn,
my heart revolts from any other love than theirs. In

(21:22):
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 Lonothlind.
On the twenty three she met Sarah Ponsonby at plas Knewid,
which was their home. Eleanor was ill that day and
was asleep during aunt's visit. She exchanged some letters with

(21:43):
the Ladies of Longothlind 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 property
and collect portions of their rent. And Anne continued to
manage the domestic world of the household. While Anne was

(22:05):
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 the family
with an ongoing comfortable income and to situate the estate
so that it would be worth more when it was

(22:25):
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 also began
traveling extensively all over Europe as she continued to look

(22:47):
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 to any long
term attachment. It was back home in Halifax that Anne

(23:08):
Lester 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 asking them whether
they like Teaket and Sarah like this is sort of

(23:29):
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, so she had added
a wilderness garden complete with waterfalls and a small chamiere

(23:51):
which is a thatch roof hut, and this hut became
her retreat while she can while she courted and Walker.
And Walker, for her part, is wary of an Lister,
and Lister made no secret of the fact that she
was interested in and Walker's money, and ann Walker knew
and Lister was not in love with her. But by

(24:11):
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 funded a lot of

(24:34):
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 at managing a
coal mining operation rather than leasing the rights to someone

(24:56):
else and earning money that way, and Walker's money fund
at the sinking of two coal pits on Shipden Hall's property.
The two ants also continued traveling as much as their
time and Anne Walker's money allowed, and Lister was really
the one driving these trips. She had way more wander
less than Anne Walker did. These weren't laid back pleasure

(25:17):
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. She was

(25:38):
at that point a d in control of shib 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 eight thirty nine,

(26:00):
they left on a two year trip through Scandinavia, the
Low Countries and Russia. The following year, and Lister contracted
some kind of fever while touring the Caucusus. In her
last diary entry, dated August eighteen forty, she doesn't mention
anything odd about her health, but on September twenty she

(26:20):
died at the age of forty nine. She had 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 Lister was finally buried at
Halifax Parish Church. Their relationship had not always been particularly happy,

(26:41):
right I just I imagine an Walker just kind of
gritting her teeth through some of this travel when she
really wanted to be at home with their nice garden
in the waterfall in the library at Shipton Hall. But
and Lister's death and this long journey home with her
body really took a toll on an walk his health.
In eighteen forty two, her sister and a doctor conspired

(27:04):
to have her declared insane and committed to an asylum
so 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. Ann Lister's diaries stayed
in the family library until the late nineteenth century. John

(27:27):
Lister's parents had inherited the estate when he was eight,
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. Ton
Lister was horrified. I mean, I can't stress that they

(27:50):
are really explicit. Uh. And apart from there being really explicit,
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 Lister thought about burning these diaries
when he realized what was in them. Ultimately, I think

(28:13):
fortunately he locked them away again. It's been speculated that
John Lister also had relationships with 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

(28:36):
explicit content in their published work. Dr Phyllis 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,

(28:59):
at least some of the stigma surrounding lesbian 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 so these two volumes

(29:23):
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 the internet. It

(29:45):
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 very boring. Weather

(30:07):
and Ye had like transaction talk, so that would be
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

(30:27):
was ahead of her time. She successfully managed and improved
on Shibden 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,

(30:48):
were able to do it 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

(31:10):
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,

(31:32):
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 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,

(31:54):
and even then it indicated a dysfunction more than an identity.
All of this was decade after Anne Lister's death in
eighteen forty, even though she was living before language really
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

(32:16):
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

(32:39):
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's none of that
and Ann 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 time as

(33:00):
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 Anne and her diaries
apart from some of the other women that we've talked

(33:21):
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 Lacham and
Jane Adams. Yet Jane adams life overlapped the evolution of
lesbian identity, but this isn't something that she wrote about

(33:43):
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 you know about who lived at a
time when an identity was evolving and we're like, I

(34:04):
don't feel like that word applies to me, Like we
saw 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 a like more coalesced into
an identity for men, and was similarly like, I don't

(34:27):
think that's me, even though he exclusively had relationships other
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 of the World Register page reads, in

(34:49):
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. Seen from
the viewpoint of an extremely well educated and pioneering. Should

(35:11):
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 a lot of the same exact

(35:33):
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 back bitey mean
girl letters to each other. Yeah, I think where I

(35:55):
I have a moment where I turn on analystic is
the letter or where she kind of contrives some some
poor things to happen to Eliza by sort of betraying
her and making stuff up. Yeah she yeah, Heay so

(36:18):
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
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(36:40):
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(37:02):
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