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Wednesday, June 17, 2026 - 17:00
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.
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Full citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Chapter One Anne’s Texts: Writing the Paris Sojourn 1824-25; Anne’s Journal Volume
As an illustration of how topics were handled, this section opens with “this treadmill business.” As part of her general curiosity about the world, and based on a recommendation by a friend, Lister decided to view and try out the penal treadmill at Clerkenwell prison. Public reaction to this event haunted her for some time. Evidently her proposed visit was so out of line for gender and class expectations of the time that not only was she required to get special permission from the prison magistrates, but the event was considered noteworthy and peculiar enough to be reported in London newspapers, and also the paper aimed at English ex-pats in Paris, where she was next heading. So she not only arrived in Paris to find gossip waiting for her, but she agonized over the possibility that the story would make it to Halifax.
In two journal entries, Lister notes having discussed the event with Mrs. Barlow and with her landlady Madame de Boyve. A connection is made between the public reaction to the treadmill event and reactions to Lister’s display of personal style and manners. While Lister regularly veered outside normative behavior, she disliked being viewed as straying outside class boundaries.
The treadmill incident appears in Lister’s texts in multiple ways, reflecting her various textual strategies. Most of her journal entries about it are in crypt hand, where she is exploring how she felt and reacted. But the journal used plain hand (as does her correspondence) to defend and explain her actions. Crypt hand was for internal processing, plain hand was for constructing a public representation of the event. Thus this one topic (and one not directly related to the more fraught issues of romance and sex) illustrates that the interplay of journal and letters, encryption and not, is more complicated than “crypt hand is for sex.”
This section concludes by laying out the contents of the chapter: an analysis of the format and contents of the journal, a similar analysis of letters, and an exploration of how the two are interconnected.
Anne’s Journal Volume
This section analyzes the nature of Lister’s journal and its contents, more in a structural sense than a narrative sense (which will be covered later).
She wrote a journal entry for every day of the Paris stay although, as will be discussed later, some entries were written up retrospectively. The physical volume that includes the Paris trip begins a month and a half before she traveled and continues for four months after her return to England, with about 2/3 covering Paris.
The physical specifications of the journal are described. The pages were blank and unlined, meaning that any formatting of the text was entirely by Lister’s choices. In addition to the daily entries, the journal contains three other types of content: a summary of letters received and sent, an index of books read, and an index to the journal entries that included brief summaries of their content and a number of symbols used to highlight content of particular interest. Orr notes that while previous researchers have undoubtedly used these indexes, they have not previously been analyzed for content.
The summary of letters comes first. Material from the letters was sometimes recorded in daily journal entries but would not then be included in the journal entry index, thus keeping structural separation between the two indexes.
[Note: I may have missed it – or the information may come later – but I don’t see a reference to whether Lister allocated a certain number of blank pages to the correspondence index before beginning the daily journal.]
Next in the volume come the daily entries. The index to the daily entries appears in the back of the volume with the book turned upside down so that the text progresses in standard fashion from the cover inward. (In theory, the volume would be full when the daily entries and the index met in the middle, but in actual fact a section of unused pages was left.)
Although Lister noted at one point that the index would be useful “should I ever publish” and although she used it when rereading older material, she never did create any sort of comprehensive or retrospective summary of her life and experiences.
The literary index, also located in the back of the volume, was written almost entirely in plain hand, one exception being a 16th century book of erotic poetry. The daily index used a mixture of crypt and plain hand. In general the writing mode in the index matched that in the entries, but there were exceptions.
The length of the entries and index notes was variable due to several factors. During the courtship of Mrs. Barlow, entries increased in length due to the amount of description and analysis Lister devoted to this topic. During particularly busy times not related to her romances, the entries might be relatively short, such as during her initial days in Paris, or when preparing to move or travel.
The journal index not only summarized key topics but signaled degrees of interest, especially using two symbols. The “cross” symbol (+) flagged sexual events. Within the journal entries it often indicated a session of masturbation, linked to the specific time of day and context. While text might describe this as “incurring a cross” a plus sign would be placed in the page margin to flag that content.
But the plus sign was not limited to recording masturbation. It also occurs in conjunction with references to reading sexually stimulating material. In all cases, a plus sign in the journal entry would be echoed by one in the relevant index, whether of the daily entries or literature.
A different symbol, the section mark § (also known as a silcrow), was used to flag content of particular interest. This was used in sets of 1 to 3 symbols appearing in both the journal entry and its index entry. A single mark was most common. A double mark was somewhat less frequent and marked topics that Lister might want to review in the future. The rare triple mark indicated experiences of intense emotion, whether positive or negative. There is a discussion providing examples of the types of content that each might appear with. There is a correlation between the number of markers and the amount of crypt hand in the associated passages.
The next part of the section describes in detail changes in the length of journal entries and the use of crypt hand relative to the events in Lister’s life. Factors that might result in postponing the writing up of entries are also considered. In some cases, an entry might note an event that interrupted the writing process, describing it in a footnote.
A separate writing practice enabled these delayed write ups to retain their accuracy and detail. Lister wrote up “memoranda” on slips kept in a “pocket casebook” kept close. These would record the details in real time that would be expanded in later journal entries. They might also be used for drafting entries or letters when particular care in composition was desired. [Note: possibly these memoranda were discarded after being written up in a more permanent form.]
[Aside: Completely unrelated to Lister, her practice here reminds me of a similar one my great-great-grandfather describes in the context of his Civil War diaries and letters from the 1860s. He would write up daily memoranda that would later be the basis for more detailed letters to family. But in his case the memoranda were written up in a notebook, which he would then mail home when it was full, and not on discardable slips of paper.]
Lister’s purpose in creating such a detailed record of her life is alluded to in an entry from 1821.
“By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past and present and thus to cheer and edify the future.”
The section concludes with a summary of the types of topics that Lister recorded in her journals.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2026 - 08:00
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. But I have one adage that I hold to, both in my own research and when teaching others, which is: "if you don't know how you know something, then you don't really know it." Given the firehose of online factoids that we are constantly inundated with, this is a good principle to keep in mind. How much of what we receive online is something we actually "know" by this standard?
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LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Representing Anne in Paris
When focusing on the Paris era, Orr found that existing edited material was deficient. Although Whitbread’s No Priest But Love focused on a similar period, she included less than 1/6 of the journal material for that era. Green cataloged 30 letters from the era, but included only 17 of them. Liddington emphasized the importance of incorporating other documentary material–account books, etc.—for a complete understanding.
Is this section, Orr reviews the nature and scope of the documentary material covering the 1824–25 Paris trip, plus some additional material that provides context for the trip and its experiences. Orr also notes certain topics which she excluded from detailed analysis, such as a brief flirtation with a Miss Pope and an evidently platonic, if sometimes indecorous, relationship with her French language teacher who was not part of the residence at Place Vendôme.
Orr’s interest is in how we use sources like journals and letters to produce “women’s history.” They are often trivialized as primarily emotional rather than rational, autobiographical while not being intended for public consumption, and part of a personal analytic self-fashioning rather than a neutral record.
This section includes a lot of theory-talk about the interpretation of such sources. It then moves on to lay out Orr’s editorial practices, intended to find a balance between readability and preserving structural data, such as distinguishing crypt hand from plain hand. As the crypt hand included no distinction of case, no punctuation, and no word spacing, the edited versions adopt these formatting practices from how similar text was treated in plain hand. Indications of Lister’s corrections and insertions are explained. Abbreviations are generally expanded, except for personal names where the use of abbreviation can indicate degrees of familiarity. The handling of illegible text is discussed.
The section ends by laying out the three topics that are the focus of the work—textual issues, social context, and sexual practices—then reiterating the key reasons why Lister’s material is of importance to history.
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Monday, June 15, 2026 - 17:00
It's been along day involving a flat tire and I'm tired, so no clever intro today.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Sexuality and Sociality in Anne’s Journals
In this section, Orr challenges the accepted ideas about the meaning and uses of Lister’s “crypt hand.” Most previous editors have presented excerpts from the diaries that do not clearly distinguish material recorded in cipher from that in ordinary writing. Whitbread notes the crypt hand was used to record Lester’s “intimate” (that is, sexual) life, creating the impression that her sexual and emotional observations were always encrypted and that crypt hand was used only for this purpose. But the crypt hand was also used in correspondence with her intimate partners–the sharing of the key was an almost ritual aspect of a shift in her relationship with someone.
Even so, the correlation of the use of crypt hand with content related to sexuality has helped produce a segregation in analysis and theorizing about Lister’s life, depending on whether a researcher utilized the encrypted materials or not. The encryption also helped enable censorship about her sexuality, beginning with John Lister’s published excerpts that drew only from the “public” portions.
When examined across writing modes (crypt versus plain) and genres (journal versus letters), Lister’s voice is notably consistent. With respect to the use of crypt hand, Whitbread concluded it was used for matters that Lister wished to keep secret–not only sexual matters, but thoughts about her clothing. Some researchers have identified the crypt hand a type of “closet,” enabling Lister to create a separation of her public and private identities. Yet Lister’s commentary on both her sexuality and use of the crypt hand do not reflect this idea. She expresses no stigma about her desires, considering them utterly natural. And her internal dialogues about her sexuality appear in both types of writing, intertwined with each other. Further, Listers “plain hand” had its own version of obfuscation, in a dense system of abbreviations and cramped writing. When she found Maria Barlow examining her journal she made no protest, suggesting she “make out what you can,” evidently considering the decipherment of even plain hand to be sufficient barrier.
The crypt hand had its own arc of evolution, initially used to record brief expressions of emotion and only later expanding to extensive passages; expanding from the use of Greek letters to a more extensive repertory. Handwriting was not the only technique used to create meaningfully distinct texts. When Lister first became involved with Mariana, she began a new journal specific to recording that relationship. Rather than her name being transcribed, Mariana was assigned a unique symbol within the text. By the time of her relationship with Mariana, Lister had developed her own sexual vocabulary, using “kiss” to indicate an orgasm, and ‘cross” or a cross symbol to indicate masturbation.
In Rowanchild’s analysis of the journals, she identifies the network of women with whom Lister shared the key to the crypt hand, representing a privileged “inner circle” of women who engaged in same-sex relations.
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Sunday, June 14, 2026 - 17:00
Today's section of Orr's dissertation looks at the ways in which other researchers have interpreted Lister's life.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Theorizing Anne’s Sexual and Social Identity
Each of the major editions of Lister material focused on selected aspects of her social or sexual identity at specific life stages. This disjunction mirrors similar disjunctions within lesbian and feminist history. Operating in the context of queer and feminist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, Whitbread and Faderman tended to view Lister’s sexuality through a modern lens, applying sexological theories, or viewing her as transmasculine.
Faderman’s claim that Lister “would have recognized herself” in the sexologists’ category of “congenital invert” (a theoretical framework that was not created until decades after Lister’s death) as she considers Lister’s self-description as incompatible with the prevailing framework of (nonsexual) romantic friendship. But all of these frameworks – invert, romantic friendship, and whatever Lister experienced – are social constructs specific to a particular historic context. Orr notes that further analysis suggests that the “mannish lesbian” stereotype that flourished around the turn of the 20th century was not a product of sexological theory, but rather was an existing identity that emerged out of its specific historic context, and not some sort of universal constant that could be applied retroactively.
Others who have studied Lister’s life have tried to fit her into a butch-femme framework, seeing her as the only “true” lesbian within her various relationships and looking to apply the same dichotomy to other homoerotic couples she encountered. But this view privileges the visibility of Lister’s appearance and behavior, contributing to “femme erasure” and artificially reinforcing a binary view of lesbian identity rather than exploring potential continuity.
By looking for historic reflections of the cultural and behavioral features of modern lesbian identity, the illusion of absence is created, leading to projecting modern identities into that void. Lister’s unambiguous and explicit statements of her erotic orientation and practices were then considered evidence that “modern lesbianism” could now be pushed a century earlier than the sexology era. But this framing separates her from her own historic context–making her a precursor of modern identity rather than an ordinary exemplar of her own era.
If one steps away from the imperative to find a reflection of modern lesbianism, Lister begins to appear to belong solidly to her own time. Sedgwick argues that Lister could be “an almost archetypal Jane Austen heroine.” Many aspects of her life and loves fit solidly within the social and literary discourse of the long 18th century. But even those historians who connect her with 18th century themes fall prey to pigeonholing. Mavor associates her with the late 18th century “cult of sapphism,” ignoring the evidence that Lister was well aware of “sapphic practices” and disavowed that as an identity. [Note: We could use a closer look at exactly what Lister considered “sapphic practices.” Perhaps that will be covered later in this work. The specific aspect she notes is the use of a dildo, which seems an awfully specific thing to define an identity around.] Regardless of how she felt about the idea and label, she was clearly aware of it and the idea it was available to her in her own negotiation of identity. When Lister contrasts her own “natural” style of lovemaking to the “artifice” of the dildo-wielding sapphists, this distracts from how otherwise similar the two appear.
In her focus on education and self-improvement, Lister also has strong echoes of the bluestockings, but once again we have direct evidence that she was aware of that culture and considered herself separate from it. She has comments that seem to reflect an internalized misogyny–valuing her own learning but disapproving of women’s education for others and not valuing education in her own potential lovers. Here we see the conflict between Listers class identity (conservative, upper-class) and modern expectations of female or queer solidarity.
Lister had a variety of examples of other female romantic couples to compare herself to. She visited the Ladies of Llangollen while traveling in Wales and speculated on the nature of their relationship. More locally, she socialized with a female couple Miss Pickford and Miss Threlfall and recognized their couplehood as similar to what she inspired to. Yet she deliberately misled Pickford about her own sexual desires and experience, even as she elicited confessions from Pickford.
But each of these intersections demonstrate that Lister not only was not temporally isolated in absolute terms, but was not isolated even in her own direct experience. Even if her experience and practices differed in detail from those of other women she encountered, she clearly existed within a continuum of homoerotic practice within her own historic context. This evidence of a “lesbian continuum” (to use Adrienne Rich’s term) around the turn of the 19th century contradicts the theories of historians like Smith Rosenberg and Faderman who saw a sharp dichotomy between nonsexual (though often sensual) romantic friendship and lesbian relations defined by genital sexuality. The problem is that–as we actively see in Lister’s own writing and negotiations–active management of sexual knowledge and representation mean that we could rarely know where the dividing line was between sexual and non-sexual relationships.
Among the other models of lesbianism that we know Lister had access to were classical texts like Juvenal’s satires and novels such as Belinda. She may even have been aware of the Pirie and Woods court case. Lister commented on medical texts discussing lesbianism that she found unhelpful in understanding herself. [Note: From context, it appears the central point was the myth of the macro-clitoral lesbian. Lister examined her own genitals and found no evidence of such a thing.]
Lester also used reading and texts as a way of engaging with other women, either using texts such as Byron to sound them out on their romantic receptiveness, or arranging for parallel reading as a practice reinforcing couplehood.
Although Lister sometimes described her own behavior in masculine terms, such as “gentlemanly” she does not–contrary to some historians’ claims–appear to have considered herself “a man in a woman’s body,” even though on one or more occaseven though on one or more occasions she records having fantasized about having a penis or about passing in order to marry. On one occasion she describes herself as “not all masculine but rather softly gentleman-like.” But the forms and nomenclature of heteronormativity were inescapable. She referred to her established partnerships as “like husband and wife.” [Note: This was hardly unique to Lister. Romantic correspondence between women regularly used husband-wife language from as early as the 17th century through the 20th.] The sartorial presentation that felt natural to her was a hybrid of specific masculine-coded garments and an avoidance of “femininity” via the use of sober colors and plain stylings. Some researchers have analyzed how Lister deployed shifting strategies of presentation to address the varied concerns of gender and class. Class was an extremely significant aspect of her identity that she was constantly constructing, negotiating, and defending.
Class becomes relevant in exploring how Lister built relationships with women that she was not romantically involved with. Further, her interactions were not always clearly distinguished between romantic and not. Many women shifted easily between the categories of acquaintance, friend, flirtation, affair, and romance.
Orr sets out that her purpose is not to “correct” previous conclusions about Lister’s sexuality, but to identify some that have become accepted knowledge and overwrite them with a more nuanced view that draws on her specific historic context, rather than evaluating her life in terms of anachronistic models.
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Saturday, June 13, 2026 - 07:00
Orr's dissertation aims to approach the Lister documentary material from previously unexplored angles. So the first step is to map out the existing landscape. (To be honest, it sometimes feels like Orr is criticizing previous work for not having studied aspects it didn't set out to study. But I guess a dissertation needs to justify its existence.)
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Representations of “Anne Lister”
This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.
The discussion moves on to the history of Orr’s engagement with the material. Orr describes how each researcher presented the contents (and thus their version of Lister) differently. Although Whitbread published one volume focusing on the Paris trip, Orr views it as having marginalized the presence of Maria Barlow in favor of framing Mariana as Lister’s one grand passion.
Liddington drew from a wider variety of sources and focused on the larger social and political context of Lister’s life, as a mature woman. Liddington’s take on Lister’s sexuality has a negative tinge, touching on her manipulativeness and predatory reputation.
Green, who avoided touching on the explicit material, focused on Lister the traveler, drawing primarily from her correspondence rather than the focus on the diaries that others used.
Thus, previous work formed a patchwork, employing different subsets of the material and displaying different aspects of Lester’s life–ones that can almost seem to be different people. The section concludes by pointing out how this dynamic leaves space for a new, more integrated understanding of Lister that attempts to understand her within her own context, rather than fitting her into pre-existing theoretical frameworks.
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Friday, June 12, 2026 - 14:00
In order to make this dissertation manageable, I will be posting it in smaller segments--portions of the fairly lengthy chapters.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Introduction
This is a doctoral dissertation so it’s structured somewhat differently than a book would be, although of similar length. The work examines the period of Anne Lister’s life when she was in Paris in 1824, and particularly how she interacted with a community of women there, both socially and romantically. The focus is how Lister’s various written records document and reflect those interactions, including how her “crypt hand” cipher reflects her psychological states and processes.
The dissertation is structured in six parts: an introduction, three sections examining key aspects of the topic, a conclusion section, and appendices. The main sections are a bit awkward in length–a bit long for conveniently covering in a single post, while their subsections are perhaps shorter than ideal for individual blogs. But I’ll mostly be covering them in shorter chunks in order to meet my artificial goal of blogging every day for Pride Month.
# # #
The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
A key element of Lister’s extensive documentary record in journals and correspondence is her romantic and sexual interactions with women, beginning in her earliest diary during her school days when she began an intense romance with fellow student Eliza Raine, continuing with a more casual relationship with neighbor Isabella Norcliffe, an extended but ultimately unsatisfactory romance with Mariana Lawton, the brief affair with Maria Barlow that is central to this study, and her eventual romantic partnership with Ann Walker that lasted until Lister’s death.
For about a century, excerpts from Lister’s papers were published to illustrate various aspects of her life, but with the lesbianism carefully censored. Not until the 1980s was this aspect of her life made public, after which it became a focus of intense interest for queer and women’s historians. The explicit, detailed, and revealing descriptions of her sexual attitudes and activities upended the conventional view of 19th-century women’s same-sex relationships as being limited to conventional sentimentality and platonic affection.
But Lister’s sexuality continued to be interpreted in ways that failed to disturb existing narratives. She was a unique anomaly. She was an early example of the sexologists “congenital invert.” She could be interpreted in the framework of butch-femme culture. Some even considered the journals to be inauthentic. But all these approaches ignored the historic context of her life rather than using her to expand the understanding of early 19th century sexuality.
There were a number of possible models for same-sex relations that Lister could have “tried on” to understand herself. She explicitly rejects the label of “sapphist.” [Note: Although she appears to associate the word with specific behaviors, especially the use of a dildo.] Other possible identities include bluestockings (whose circles often included same-sex bonds of various types) or theatrical crossdressing up (given that she identified her preferred sartorial style as “masculine”).
The text reviews various takes on Lister by previous authors working with her material. These produced different views depending on the interests (and avoidances) of the researchers. Muriel Green- focused on Lister as a traveler and erased any mention of her sexuality. Liddington was most interested in her social and political context, while acknowledging her sexuality. Whitbread focused primarily on her sexuality but shaped her presentation of the material around the idea of Mariana as the central “great romance.” Others have presented a more integrated view of her life but worked from the existing published excerpts rather than returning to the original documents.
Orr cautions against using Lister’s life as a single cornerstone for new understandings of homosexual history, or trying to fit her life into existing categories, yet the value that Lister contributes to our historic understanding cannot be overstated.
Given this, Orr sets about to create an experiential understanding of Lister’s relationship to her world, in particular how she initiated and developed erotic relationships with women, as recorded in her own writings. The choice of Maria Barlow for this is due to several factors. The entire period of their interactions is well documented. It began at a time with Lister at extensive previous sexual experience. The relationship progressed significantly (unlike some briefer flirtations). And this particular relationship has not been seriously studied previously.
Barlow was a mature and experienced woman–a widow with a child. She was economically independent and met Lister on a relatively equal footing. The relationship is also of analytical interest in that it began within a female community (at a boarding house) that illustrates the everyday interactions and social connections against which it is differentiated. Another feature is that the relationship developed when Lister was displaced from her family setting (and from English culture entirely) allowing the highlighting of her sexual habits and textual practices against a neutral background.
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Thursday, June 11, 2026 - 11:00
When I pulled together the journal articles in my folders on biographical topics for this cluster I also added a couple other publications that I had in electronic form on the topic of Anne Lister. As one of those items is a doctoral dissertation and another is a collection of articles, these materials are likely to see me through pretty much the rest of June. There is, as I sometimes comment humorously, an entire academic industry of Anne Lister studies. This means that I sometimes pick and choose to avoid having this and similarly well-documented topics overwhelm a broader coverage of lesbian history. This first article in the set makes a good introduction, as it covers the history of interactions with, and deciphering of, Lister's journals.
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LHMPFull citation:
Liddington, Jill. 1993. “Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax (1791-1840): Her Diaries and the Historians” in History Workshop, 35: 45-77.
When reading this article, I had to keep reminding myself that it was written more than 30 years ago. The second volume of Helena Whitbread’s selections from the diaries had just been published. Anne Lister had not yet evolved into an entire academic industry. It would be interesting to put together an extensive chronology of Lister scholarship since then to illustrate how knowledge and awareness of her spread.
# # #
This is not so much an article about Anne Lister history as it is Anne Lister historiography. It traces the awareness of her life and diaries, both scholarly and popular. The article begins with a very brief biography that situates her life in time and space.
Initial awareness of the importance of the Lister papers centered on their scope and the potential for detailed evidence of everyday life in her particular social context. An article in 1991 noted the daunting task for the researcher to tackle the 24 volumes (actually 27) consisting of 2 million words (eventually determined to be more like 4 million) in a relatively difficult hand, even before dealing with the coded “crypt hand” that made up about a sixth of the text. As a comparison, the famously detailed diaries of Samuel Pepys from the 17th century come in at only one and a quarter million words. In the 1991 article, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Lister’s birth, there was only a suggestion that she “may well have been a lesbian” although Whitbread’s first volume of extracts had established the fact rather solidly three years earlier.
The diaries are only a fraction of the archival material from Shibden Hall, which provides essential historical context for the site and family. And Anne Lister’s fascinating personal life is only a small part of the historic value of the archive. But this article focuses on the history of the diaries and their interpretation, including the points where their survival was uncertain.
After Lister’s death in 1840, her estate was left to her wife Ann Walker for her lifetime, after which it would go to relatives. Three years later, Walker’s relatives conspired to have her declared insane, creating a legal squabble between the two families. An inventory of papers was drawn up in 1850 in the midst of this process, including a line-item for 3 parcels labeled “Diaries and Journals of Mrs. Lister.”
After Walker’s death, the property went to a branch of the Lister family that had been living in Wales. John Lister–the key figure in this history–was born seven years after Anne Lister’s death and was eight years old when the family moved to Shibden Hall. Local memory of Anne was no doubt still active, but may have focused on her eccentricity and refusal to marry. The relationship with Ann Walker would likely have been folded into general acceptance of romantic friendships between women. John Lister, in his 40s (circa 1887 onward) begin publishing selections from the diaries in a local paper, focusing on social and political anecdotes.
[Note: There is a prevalent myth in Lister lore that the diaries were “hidden away behind a panel” like a buried treasure. When I visited Shibden Hall, the museum staff took pains to contradict this, pointing out the built-in cabinetry where the diaries and other archives had been kept. John’s work with the diaries also points out that they were known–even if the more controversial contents were yet to be identified.]
Although the ordinary text of the diaries makes regular reference to the women that Anne had relationships with, the personal details were all encoded. John was aware of the cipher but didn’t begin trying to decipher it until he and an antiquarian friend found a phrase that turned out to be something of a Rosetta Stone, confirming the correspondence of a handful of letters.
Their Initial transcriptions revealed material that “turned out…to be entirely unpublishable.” The friend recommended that the diaries be burned to conceal their contents. John Lister refused. This was in 1885, when sexological theories of homosexuality were just beginning to spread. John was no doubt balancing an antiquarian’s respect for ancient documents with a concern for the Lister family reputation. There is also reasonable evidence that John himself was homosexual, which may have added complications to his considerations.
In any event, another 40 years passed before the next engagement with the diaries occurred. John died in 1933 and, although evidence of his deciphering survives in his papers, the knowledge was not passed directly to other scholars. A local librarian took on responsibility for the Lister papers and his daughter, Muriel Green, took on the task of organizing and cataloging. She was stymied by the cipher but began work on Anne’s correspondence. Her father managed to make contact with John’s antiquarian friend who shared how the code had been cracked 50 years earlier, adding a warning about the scandalous contents, but providing the cipher key that he and John had worked out.
Muriel later recalled that she and her father had never discussed Anne’s sexuality at that time and she kept all mention of the topic out of her transcripts of Anne’s letters. In 1938 Muriel published her catalog and transcript of the correspondence (an abridged version of which was published in 1992 as Miss Lister of Shibden Hall).
Another 20 years passed, then Phyllis Ramsden and another local historian decided to tackle the diaries. They don’t appear to have had contact with Muriel, but the local museum committee offered them a copy of the cipher key. Around 1966 they compiled an index and chronology of the contents, including references to content in the cipher, but they censored the sexual content, noting that it was “almost exclusively of such purely personal content as to contain nothing of historic importance or interest.” Their publications were also subject to review and approval by the library committee.
Clearly, awareness of the nature of and coded material was spreading, but it was still considered too scandalous to make public. Indeed, some of the transcripts Ramsden had created were deliberately destroyed to prevent unauthorized use.
But by 1970 access was improving and the requirement for committee approval had dropped. In the mid-1980s, Helena Whitbread began her own transcriptions of the cipher text and published her first volume of extracts I Know My Own Heart in 1988. Now Anne Lister’s lesbianism and self-identification were open knowledge in the world. A second volume followed, detailing Lister’s year in Paris (No Priest But Love) and though there was some controversy around the publications (and the accusation that they put unwarranted emphasis on the more sensational aspects of the diaries) there was no putting the cat back in the bag.
Liddington, having encountered Whitbread’s work, became interested in adding to the project. The remainder of the article focuses on three specific time points, providing excerpts and context: her school years from 1806 to 1810, late 1819, and a brief period in 1832. Liddington’s more extensive books based on Lister research were yet to come when this article was written.
The article concludes with a summary of the key historic importance of Anne Lister’s documentary material, not simply to the history of sexuality, but as a female land owner, and a woman active in industrial and political movements of the day.
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Wednesday, June 10, 2026 - 15:00
When it comes down to it, the Codrington divorce trial is not a shining example of much of anything. Maybe Helen Codrington and Emily Faithful had a lesbian affair? But the divorce trial was about Helen's heterosexual extra-marital relations. The hint of the threat of a revelation of Emily's sexual orientation comes into play only to prevent her from testifying on Helen's behalf. And it's quite possible that the testimony Helen wanted her to give would have been false in the first place. But it still provides insight into Victorian ways of talking about lesbianism without ever actually mentioning it.
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LHMPFull citation:
Vicinus, Martha. “Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial” pp.92-94 in Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997).
If you want an interesting fictional version of the Codrington divorce trial and its context, check out Emma Donaghue’s The Sealed Letter.
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The main point of this article is how, in the course of a Victorian divorce trial that was a ostensibly about heterosexual adultery, lesbianism became the ghost at the banquet–present largely in the refusal of any of the participants to name it. The situation shows the overlapping dynamic between the image of female romantic friendships as acceptable and unproblematic, and the anxiety around friendships that appeared to infringe on marriage imperatives.
The developing image of lesbianism that became established solidly around the turn of the century emerges slowly in hints and whispers as early as the mid 19th century. Romantic friendships existed in a wide range of expressions and evoked a similarly wide range of reactions from positive to negative. Vicinus deliberately uses the word “lesbian” to name a portion of these expressions. The dynamics that tended to provoke anxiety included “mannish” presentation (popular as a fashion style among feminists) and resistance to marriage, especially in favor of female friendships. Although romantic friends frequently described non-genital eroticism, that doesn’t exclude further activities, given the social restraints on what could and could not be spoken of openly. Because such things were not explicit, there was a scope for them to be assumed or understood without being named.
The primary focus of this article Is on the intersection of marriage and lesbian relations. Although the Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres” for the sexes left a great deal of room for homosocial and homoerotic interactions, this was in a context where marriage was an assumed constant. At the same time, the ideal of romantic “companionate” marriage didn’t play well with the reality of patriarchal authority and a legal system that university privileged men.
The 19th century version of feminism focused on reform of marriage laws alongside issues of education and employment. Even after some reform of divorce laws, men were still the primary instigators and beneficiaries. The barrier for a woman to achieve divorce was high (far beyond simple adultery) while men could cite a wide range of faults that damaged their “property interest” in their wives’ reputations.
The essential facts of the Codrington divorce trial are complex. Admiral Codrington had a cold and unaffectionate nature, which was a very bad fit for his vivacious flirtatious wife. He disliked social events, she lived for them. In the hothouse environment of the British base at Malta, her flirtations with young officers threatened his reputation. Back in England, she moved on to probable adultery with two named men, one of whom she plotted an elopement with.
Helen Codrington was emotionally supported, though not necessarily outright abetted, by her close friend Emily Faithful. Faithful was seven years younger than Helen and during several years around age 20 lived in the Codrington household in London. Admiral Codrington at that time had ceased sexual relations with his wife, for the purposes of birth control, and Emily shared Helen’s bedroom and bed while living there. The key incident raised in the divorce trial involved one night when Codrington entered his wife’s bedroom and “attempted to take improper liberties with Miss Faithful.” The question of what actually happened is not resolved–Faithful changed her testimony from “possibly” to “I was asleep and don’t know,” but one of the background implications is that Codrington may have observed something that caused him to be suspicious of the relationship between the two women. He ejected Faithful from the household and allegedly wrote the “sealed letter,” detailing his reasons for doing so, that was later held over her head as an implied threat during the trial.
Faithful moved on to join feminist circles and became a leading activist, lecturer, and publisher. Half a dozen years later during the divorce trial, Faithful initially supported Helen Codrington’s claims of mistreatment, but then suddenly fled London to avoid a subpoena and, when she later returned as the trial resumed, threw Helen under the bus and declined to support any of her claims.
Helen Codrington lost everything in the divorce but Emily Faithful came out with her reputation relatively unscathed, though gossip that combined events of the trial with her position as a prominent feminist hinted strongly at her “mannish” proclivities. It’s quite likely that the gossip was mostly accurate. Faithful lived the rest of her life in all-female circles and in her will left everything to her longtime partner Charlotte Robinson.
Another clue to the nature of Helen and Emily’s relationship appears in the novel that Faithful wrote about a promiscuous and flighty heroine who is an obvious stand-in for Helen Codrington, and a gender-flipped self-insertion hero who vainly believes that he can reform and redeem the woman with his ennobling love. The novel is not at all kind to the Helen character.
The lesbian implications of Helen and Emily’s friendship are elusive. Nothing they did fell outside the bounds of accepted friendship, and even Emily’s later life never involved any open public scandal. Everything was hints and implications. Faithful successfully spun those implications to frame herself as a naïve supportive friend who was led astray by the older, sexually-experienced seductress (by implication only). In a slightly later age, the implications would have been more likely to evoke the image of the mannish lesbian seductress, interfering in the marriage of the object of her devotion. But the discourse hadn’t yet moved to that point.
The lesbian implications were stronger once one moved away from strait-laced London society. The poet Robert Browning (who was a friend of much more overtly lesbian figures such as Charlotte Cushman’s artistic circle in Rome) told a female friend that the “sealed letter” contained “a charge I shall be excused from even hinting to you–fear of the explosion of which caused the shift” in Emily’s support. Search references to things that cannot be named or spoken of are common dog whistles for homosexuality.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2026 - 11:00
There are many angles to be had on the ladies of Llangollen. This article looks specifically at the aesthetics of the rural cottage retreat as an element both for romantic friendship and Romanticism in general.
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LHMPFull citation:
Reynolds, Nicole. 2010. “Cottage Industry: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Symbolic Capital of the "Cottage Ornée"” in The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 51, No. 1/2: 211-227
In the 18th century, the ideals around female romantic friendships included the image of a rural retirement from society. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the “Ladies of Llangollen,” not only achieved this goal but helped promulgate the image of “cottage life” through extensive renovations, interior and exterior decoration, and the development of the grounds.
While the article notes the women’s place as icons of romantic friendship (and the discourse around whether it is appropriate to categorize them as lesbians), it focuses strongly on the relationship between the Romantic literary movement, cottage culture, and their place in it.
The Ladies, by embracing the performance of rural bourgeois domesticity that their home represented, were able to deflect much of the anxiety their history and personal lives might otherwise have generated. This performance–which included shared intellectual interests, extensive correspondence and memoirs, and a carefully-curated accessibility to visitors and tourists—helped construct their public image, as well as contributing to an interest in rural “romantic” tourism in Wales.
The motif of rural life representing virtue and morality was being generally embraced as an esthetic by the middle and upper classes, often in the form of artificial follies, but also in cottage-style architecture, enhanced into the “cottage ornée” by decoration. Architectural pattern books reflect this interest, offering varied floorplans and options for decoration that bear only a remote connection to the working class buildings that inspired them.
The unusual domestic arrangements of Butler and Ponsonby did not entirely escape scrutiny, but their embrace and display of “cottage life” helped to deflect it. Their connections with prominent figures such as lady Francis Douglas and even Queen Charlotte were bolstered by gifts of albums and architectural plans of their home.
Their performance of the ideal of “rural retreat” was not without contradictions, especially in opening their lives up, not only to their extensive literary friend circles, but to more casual tourists. [Note: Followers of and Lester may be aware that she was one of those casual tourists, and meditated afterwards on the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s relationship.]
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Sunday, June 7, 2026 - 09:00
Sometimes, what looks like a fascinating article simply turns out to be a view into an academic slap-fight. Still interesting but not particularly relevant.
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LHMPFull citation:
Bell, Rudolph M. 1987. “Renaissance Sexuality and the Florentine Archives: An Exchange” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3: pp. 485-511
This response (and re-response) to Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts is one of those features of academic discourse in which one scholar takes a public podium to critique the scholarship and conclusions of a colleague. As usual, it includes a rebuttal by the original author.
To be honest, the substance of this article hinges on details of the authorship and chronology of the primary resources but does not substantially dispute the events or conclusions with regard to Benedetta Carlini’s erotic activities. Therefore I see no practical point in summarizing it in detail
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