If there's a moment of pure comedy in Anne Lister's diary entries for her Paris stay, it's watching her continued obliviousness to the attempts of her landlady to hook her up with Mr. Franks. "Oh, we just happen to be the two odd people out in every social outing that Madame de Boyve has arranged. Ha ha. What a coincidence!"
Although the most significant romance that our Lister enjoyed during her Paris trip was with Mrs. Barlow, there are several other flirtations of various intensity that are documented in her journal. This section of the dissertation looks at her interactions with Mademoiselle de Sans.
People sometimes ask me how lesbians in the past found each other, and sounded each other out about their desires. In this section, looking at Lister's socializing with the MacKenzie mother and daughter in Paris, we see a teenager's insightful observation of Lister's personality, and how she used her classical education to carefully ask that sort of question.
There's some thing of a rolling process to setting up and posting these blogs. Even as I am in the middle of posting the sections of Orr's dissertation, I'm working ahead to finish writing up the remainder of the blogs for this document. I have one more work session to complete that work and then I can coast for the rest of the month. It looks like I've timed the blogs precisely to finish the current publication on the last day of June. Then I think I'll take a brief break before starting the next publication.
This section of the dissertation continues the structural analysis of Anne Listers papers by examining the interplay between her letters and journal entries.
I've developed a system of notetaking and speech to text transcription that is enabling me to keep up with my post a day for June, but there's one aspect of processing publications for the blog that I am having to delay until later. One of my side projects is creating a database of vocabulary related to lesbianism and sex between women based on primary sources quoted in the publications or on primary sources that I identify based on them. But creating the database entries involves a lot of typing of things that would not work well for the automated speech to text function.
This dissertation does a lot of setting the stage for the analysis, by digging deeply into the physical and structural aspect of Lister's records. It's always tempting to dive directly into the juicy content, but by focusing on the details of the structure, Orr is able to identify subtle shifts in how Lister treats different people and subjects.
I must confess that I am a methodology nerd. When I'm reading a historian's work, I love to hear all the details of how they're approaching the material, how they're interpreting it, and how they're presenting it. In my own nonfiction reading, I sometimes feel that this matter overwhelms the meaningful content of what I'm writing about.
It's been along day involving a flat tire and I'm tired, so no clever intro today.
Today's section of Orr's dissertation looks at the ways in which other researchers have interpreted Lister's life.
