Anne Lister

What you very rarely get to see is anything bad happening to the girls.

Anne Lister has a reputation for being able to sail through this stuff without difficulty, and I've never really examined what the reality of Victorian homophobia looks like.

I think that I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying that the life for girls in what for most of history has been bleak and just bleak beyond imagining.

and where marital rape was just a part of their lives.

There are cases of laws against them.

But I think it's so much harder for women to engage in this.

And it's clear, I mean, Anne Lister's diaries were in code, I think, right? So I think it's pretty clear that this would have been seriously frowned upon and possibly had criminal repercussions.

Because if it was simply frowned upon...

And then the second one is Anne Lister, and she is considered by some to be the first modern lesbian.

She was a very unconventional English landowner in northern England.

Her diaries from the 1800s inspired the 2019 BBC TV historical drama series Gentleman Jack.

Yes.

I think that was on HBO, too, I think.

kind of experience, yeah.

I'm just opening it to Anne Lister's Lesbian Diaries about a screening of Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.

And it goes on to talking about Gentleman Jack as well.

And there's photos that were taken at Lilac in here as well.

And in July of 1822, a woman from Yorkshire comes to see them.

Her name is Anne Lister.

She keeps a diary of her own, in code, about the women she loves.

She sits with Eleanor and Sarah and looks around the oak-dark rooms and the library and the garden, and she goes home and writes about it.

She has seen, with her own eyes, that two women can make a life together and be received by dukes.

A few years later, Anne Lister would take the sacrament with her own partner in a church in York and call it a marriage.

Now, we must acknowledge complexity, and it comes in two parts.

The first is what the record does and does not say.

But on the other hand, in this era, there was a wide latitude given for women expressing intensely romantic sentiments to female friends in correspondence.

Unless they were writing very explicitly sexual material, along the lines of what Anne Lister included in her encoded correspondence, it's unlikely that any casual reader would consider the content not proper or not womanly.

Far from indicating that a woman was unnatural in an unfit mother, the ability to feel and express love and affection for a female friend was considered a requirement for being properly womanly.

So the concerns this character sets out don't really make sense for her context.

But after the first year or so, they had turned to being only occasional lovers while maintaining a close friendship.

Okay, so far, this is a quite reasonable background for the time period.

Think about Anne Lister's boarding school romance with Eliza Raine, which had a similar arc.

But then the talk, and remember that this is in a public space regardless of how low the conversation might be, the talk turns to the protagonist's current dissatisfaction after being dropped by her most recent female lover.

This is so rare and precious in lesbian history, in LGBT history, and it's just such a joy for me to be able to share this with everyone in, in my new book.

The only comparable artifact I can think of would be Anne Lister's diary because it's in her words and as you say, is ...

That is extraordinarily rare.

You're completely right.

Anne Lister is another example of a woman who's unapologetic and proud-

Mm

... to be a lesbian, and that's so rare.

But what's so cool about Marie is she is several centuries earlier-

Another way is that you can trim it and you can tie a bow around it.

Anne Lister, the famous diarist, she would exchange lockets of pubic hair with her lovers.

Byron's girls would regularly send him locks of pubic hair.

We haven't even got on to Lady Caroline Lamb yet, but she definitely sent him great big hacks.

Uh, I'm quoting from, uh, Paul Jennings' Bradford pubs on the way to, uh, the Old Crown.

Local writer John Burnley described the music salon as packed with listeners much in need of oxygen, enjoying two neatly attired young ladies playing a duet.

The old inn, which should date you back to eig- the 18th century, was rebuilt in 1928, and in later life was known for the young ladies there who wore no attire at all.

It has now closed and been put to other uses.

Then Neptune appears and is terrified by the English firepower, which is a nice fantastical flourish in keeping with the ballad tradition.

The god of the sea also surfaces in a much earlier song, Ye Gentlemen of England, alternately titled Neptune's Raging Fury.

It dates back to the 17th century, but we know it was still popular in Nicholson's time, as it was among the repertoire of his East Riding contemporary and fellow writer Anne Lister, better known to us today as Gentleman Jack.

A sailor tells those who live at home at ease about the bitter storms and tempests poor seamen must endure.