by Anne Choma
Yet throughout her life, inheritance or no inheritance, Anne had looked to gain financial independence by realising a long-held ambition to earn a living through writing. She had talked of translating some of the classics and of writing about her travels, but she never became a published author in her own lifetime.
Capable, clever and with a natural gift for land and estate management, Anne had been the natural choice to take on the huge task of running Shibden. Not only had she impressed Uncle James with her abilities to deal with the renewal of leases and misbehaving tenants, he also knew that she would never marry and therefore the estate would not be broken up. In their conversations together, Anne had left him under no illusion that her emotional and sexual feelings for other women precluded the possibility of her ever entering into a marriage with a man, in which she stood to lose all that was hers. It was another four decades, on the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (thirty years after Anne’s death), before women would be able to keep hold of and inherit property following marriage. So, remarkable as it may seem to us now, it was Anne Lister’s lesbian sexuality (then with no name or legal recognition), which played a crucial role in helping her to keep control of her wealth at a time when it was thought that it was impossible for a woman to do so. That Uncle James, in 1826, seemed to understand and recognise this is even more extraordinary.
In becoming a landowner, Anne took on a powerful new identity, and it gave her greater visibility within the male-dominated Halifax business community – particularly with local men like Mr Christopher Rawson, the eldest son of the Rawson family, who Anne had known since her youth. Christopher Rawson was the leading banker of the town, as well as the magistrate and a land-owner and profit-hungry coal magnate. In later years, when entering into complex coal negotiations, she would exasperate both him and his younger brother Jeremiah with her commercial business acumen.
The role of landowner suited what she described as her ‘natural Tory’ politics. Anne was a traditional thinker in that she believed that decision-making powers in society should remain vested firmly in the landowners. Representing the old order, she championed the traditional demarcation of the relationship between landlord and tenant. She lamented the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 which gave greater democratic powers to men who did not own property. She poured scorn both on the working-class radicals who fought for those greater freedoms, and on her neighbours who supported their cause. Once, on hearing of the possibility that radical agitators could be selected as magistrates to the West Riding of Yorkshire, she replied caustically, ‘what impudent absurdity’ (29TH FEBRUARY 1836). While some of her male tenants following the introduction of the Bill were given the opportunity to vote in elections, Anne of course wasn’t. But, as there was no secret ballot she was still able to use her land-owning powers to the full by exerting her influence and by threatening eviction if they did not vote the way she wanted – Tory Blue.
Anne developed an early love-hate relationship with her new inheritance. Shibden was a quaint, romantically situated house going as far back as the early fifteenth century. Generations of Lister vicars, apothecaries, clothiers, farmers, lawyers and teachers had at one time called it home. She was proud of its long history, although out of snobbishness she distanced herself from the side of her family who in the past had been involved in the cloth industry, or ‘trade’ as she would have called it. Despite her good fortune, she often complained bitterly about living at the hall, describing it as being full of ‘deformities and nuisances’ (6TH JUNE 1833).
Nestled on the lea of a hill, in a wooded valley, Shibden could be a damp, cold and draughty place to live. Great coats, blankets, thick dimity dressing gowns, window frames stuffed with old pieces of newspaper – all were used at one time or other in an effort to keep out the bitter west winds. However, Anne remained steadfastly loyal to Shibden. In later years she embarked upon a plan to nurture the creaky floors and the dingy, low-ceilinged rooms. Her vision was to transform the house into something far grander – and more befitting a woman like her who had designs on extensive (expensive) foreign travel, and on moving within the higher echelons of Georgian society.
Anne was socially and financially ambitious. She was keen to make connections with people of a higher class than herself. She saw her own Halifax family as ‘drooping’, both in fortune and status. It was an image she wanted to change, the first plan of which was to try bringing the estate back into profitability by maximising its industrial potential. Under her management, the tenanted farms were farmed more efficiently, leases were managed correctly and rents were collected on time and in full. She would think later about exploiting the estate’s prized coal reserves by reopening the dormant Listerwick pit and by sinking a new one.
Anne Lister is most famous of course because of the journals she kept, which she wrote in tantalising and candid detail about her lesbian sexuality. Apart from a few loose diary pages written as a child, and two later smaller exercise books, they amount in total to twenty-four major volumes – 7,600 pages, spanning from 1816 until her death in 1840. She tailored the physical style of each diary to her own needs. When placing an order for a new one with bookseller Mr Whitley in Halifax she was specific: ‘One quarto blank book, half bound, then covered with common calf as usual, not to have less than 370 pages’ (27TH AUGUST 1831). Now recognised as a document of global significance by UNESCO for being one of the longest social commentaries ever written, in 2011 the diaries were selected as one of only twenty unique items worthy of being added to the UK Memory Bank of the World Register.
These adult diaries, which Anne started in 1816 aged twenty-five, became a vessel and repository for her thoughts and feelings. Each diary was a pseudo friend and confidante. Anne’s consistent self-analysis reflects the cultural zeitgeist of the early nineteenth century – the search for an authentic identity explored through feeling, sensibility and a post-Enlightenment sense of individuality. She described the journals as being a private memorial to herself, and her writing style was influenced by reading the literature of some of the leading philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emmanuel Kant. She made use of the privileged opportunities that came her way to develop the knowledge and skillset to write truthfully and with conviction. She wanted to write and tell her own story, but crucially only for herself. She hated the thought of being misrepresented by what she called ‘second hand’ comments:
Remember, our most familiar friend must judge of us in some sort by our own words, and we ourselves should watch these narrowly when we know that they are not in unison with, or do injustice to, our own feelings.
7TH JANUARY 1833
Anne employed two styles of writing in her diary – the first ‘plain hand’ and in the other what she called ‘crypt hand’, the latter comprising a secret code she made up from random Greek letters, numbers, symbols. In using the cryptic code to secrete information, hinting as it does as a means of self-censorship, Anne essentially presented a self that was separate and distinct from the one which flowed freely in her plain hand, a self which remains locked within a complex structure of esoteric symbols, numbers and letters. Anne said her plain hand would contain nothing of consequence. Descriptions of sex, money, bodily functions, scathing comments about people in both high society and in Halifax – in fact anything that she felt needed to be hidden – was written in code. The safe outlet provided by her crypt hand gave her an extra means of support in times of emotional need. ‘What a comfort my journal is,’ she said, ‘How I can write in crypt all as it really is and throw it off my mind and console myself. Thank God for it’ (29TH APRIL 1832).
When she was writing, Anne worked in a disciplined and structured way. She said that the ‘greatest desideratum’ [the thing most needed] was steadiness (17TH MARCH 1834). There was never a point in her life when there was any loss in form, no hiatus in production – just consistent, de
tailed, daily accounts of what she did, what she saw and what she felt.
The journals provide an opportunity for the reader to time-travel back to a lost world, full of fascinating and illuminating details of everyday life that would otherwise be lost to history. We witness Aunt Anne’s stubbornly ulcerated leg being treated with ‘lunar caustic’, Indian ‘orange-pea’ capsules and ‘fillet of diaculon plaster’ (21ST MAY 1836), and Anne ordering a prescription of the aphrodisiac ‘cantharides’ for a lover suffering a temporary loss of libido and sexual ‘irregularity’ (30TH MAY 1836). We get to know that, in Halifax in 1836, the cow doctor was called Jabus Fawthorpe, the umbrella lady in York was called Mrs Bean, and that one of the Halifax doctors who used to visit Shibden was called Dr Mason Stanhope Kenny. We understand that the description Anne gave for her disorderly staffed house (for want of good, reliable servants) was ‘hugger-mugger’, and that on 7th June 1836, Anne invented a new euphemism to describe bringing a lover to orgasm: ‘bring[ing] monsieur again’.
Anne Lister also kept fourteen volumes of separate travel journals. She was an adrenalin-fuelled thrill seeker. She scaled Swiss mountains, descended into French silver mines, clambered through Scottish caves and wandered into extinct foreign volcanoes. She slept in barns with Swiss peasants as well as dining at the table of the king and queen of Denmark. In 1838, she was recorded, along with her guide, as being the first person ever to conquer Mount Vignemale in the Spanish Alps. Notes about people and places were written, with precision, usually from the back of a bumpy travelling carriage. Personal detail was often comical, like the time in France in 1834 when she hid three newly purchased handkerchiefs from customs officers by pinning them to her knickers so that she didn’t have to pay duty on them.
Anne’s powers of observation meant that she went beyond the predictable description of rolling hills or a pretty church spire. She charmed her way into people’s houses to find out how they lived. She would extract interesting anecdotes about famous people like Lord Bryon – a poet she revered and loved. Once, having stumbled on a place where Byron had stayed, she persuaded the ‘nut-brown respectable farmer’s wife’ to let her see the very room where he had slept. Byron, said the woman, had paid her well. Anne, out of curiosity, wanted to know how much he had paid – ‘a napoleon’ the woman replied glowingly, he had ‘une telle maniere’ (‘such a manner’), she said. Upstairs, the obliging woman showed Anne another apartment, rented by an old couple for ‘9 or 10 napoleons a year’. On entering the room, Anne wrote how the old lady in excitement, aged 80, ‘skipped and danced and shewed us all her perfect set of teeth’. Before leaving, Anne was offered wine and cake, the generosity of the ‘good people’ being duly noted in her diary (23RD AUGUST 1827).
Travelling abroad meant that Anne was able to indulge herself, secretly, in some of her more unusual academic interests, particularly in the subject of human anatomy. Between 1829 and 1831 she managed to carve a secret niche for herself within a sphere of science where women were indeed absent, and in which they were also deemed incapable of understanding. Much of the interest in this section of the journals lies specifically in Anne’s attempts to rationalise, through language, the complexities and anxieties of her own nature. The pages seem to become repositories of medical facts and descriptions of dissected body parts, where through death and lifeless bodies she tries to discover more about her own living being.
In Paris in 1831 she hired an attic room on the Left Bank and had body parts supplied to her so that she could dissect them. She dissected an arm, a head and a number of foetuses. She kept a full-sized human skeleton in her room to aid her knowledge. She attended as many public autopsies as she could. Her behaviour defied convention, and she ignored any feelings of doubt that she may have had about women in petticoats obtaining a greater ‘command of the knife’. Of her first lesson in dissecting a corpse she wrote how:
Monsieur Julliart came at 1½ and staid till 4. Helping to clean all up. Had a male foetus – very small – might weigh about three pounds. Opened the abdomen. Studied the intestines and he showed me how the testicles slipped through into the bourse of scrotum. But somehow he is not very profound, and if I had as much command of the knife I think I should soon know as much or more than he does.
18TH FEBRUARY 1831
Anne studied under and became friends with two of the leading scientists of the day – Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire. She took part in the cutting edge debates about evolution and the role of religion in science. Everything was driven by her unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Her life was dominated by her voracious appetite for reading and learning.
Anne’s reliance on her books for mental well-being and personal happiness was clear – ‘What is there like gaining knowledge?’ she once said. ‘All else here below is indeed but vanity and vexation of spirit – I am happy among my books – I am not happy without them’ (2ND MAY 1829). Words on a page empowered, enlightened and educated. She said that it was our ‘intercourse with the world that blunted our feelings, which made us suspicious, and mistrustful’ and that living as she did among her books her ‘heart was left unchanged’ and her ‘feelings rather sharpened’ (2ND AUGUST 1829).
Of course, Anne Lister’s written testimony dispelling the myth of the nineteenth-century non-sexual woman is what makes her journals truly unique. Tacit acknowledgement of relationships between women was then confined in populist thought to the ‘romantic friendship’ – a relationship defined by its beauty, innocence and asexuality. Anne herself commented to a friend that ‘there was all the difference in the world between love and friendship’ – specifically in terms of love encapsulating and fulfilling both the emotional and the sexual needs of the women involved (11TH JANUARY 1824). Her diaries record in explicit detail that women were forming long-term relationships and that sex was a regular component of them. She lived in a world that had very different approaches to male and female homosexuality, with the former still being punishable by death, and the latter being left largely ignored. Anne Lister, while still exercising great discretion, was able to conduct her relationships without the threat of prison or at worst, death. Within her own social circles she carved out a niche where she could feel comfortable, accepted and safe.
When the journals were decoded in the late nineteenth century by John Lister, the last surviving member of the family to inherit and live in the house, the shock of discovering the nature of Anne’s sexuality almost resulted in the diaries being lost forever. His friend Arthur Burrell, a retired schoolmaster who had helped him to crack the crypt hand, urged him to burn them. Speaking of Anne’s relationships with women, Arthur Burrell said, ‘Hardly any one of them escaped her’. John Lister, a learned man, recognised the historical value of his ancestor’s document life and so refused his friend’s request. Instead, he decided to place the diaries back behind one of the oak panels in an upstairs bedroom. They remained there, untouched, with their secrets locked away, for another forty years.
Anne Lister was at ease with her lesbianism. It was rooted in healthy self-esteem. She said that it was her ‘natural’ inclination to love women. Her liberal interpretation of religious scripture also meant that her Anglican faith was never at odds with the desires of her body. She was at peace with her relationship to God and the church. She said to friends that she ‘should never marry’ and that she ‘could not like men’ (15TH AUGUST 1816). She wanted to love women as a woman – and not as a woman dressed as a man. ‘Thinking, as I had done last night,’ she once said, ‘of getting some country girl, Welsh perhaps, knowing that I was not a man, but yet to live with me apparently as wife’ (6TH JANUARY 1831). Her belief in traditional marriage in a Christian church at the altar before God was sacrosanct. And while she knew that she could not legally marry in church and exchange rings, she believed that she should still be able to stand before God, in front of a clergyman, take the sacrament with her intended wife, and thus solemnise their union.
Anne devised her own terminology to describe her butch lesbianism, seeing herself as the ‘connecting link’, and neither a man nor woman in society (16TH AUGUST 1823). With pride she called herself an ‘oddity’. In keeping with her keen interest in science, she explored her sexuality by examining herself internally to see if there was anything unusual about her body, only to discover the typical biology of a woman. She also read articles on subjects that spoke of an alternate identity, evident when in 1829 she lists in her literary index an article called ‘intra-abdominal hermaphroditism’.
Anne was sexually uninhibited and curious. On 17th February 1831, after ‘studying female organs of generation’ in Virey’s History of Anatomy of Women, she recalls, ‘finding out distinctly for the first time in my life the clitoris’. She had some years earlier described it as being ‘just like an internal penis’ (13TH JANUARY 1825). Following this discovery, she spent the next few months getting better acquainted with it, periodically locking herself in her water-closet ‘trying to enlarge’ it through ‘titillation’ (24TH APRIL 1831). She often experimented with herself, once inserting her finger into her anus just ‘to see what pleasure sodomy could give’, ultimately declaring just ‘for a moment or two’ that she ‘fancied it was going to be the thing’ [sexually satisfying] (30TH NOVEMBER 1824). With her partners she was the dominant one, the initiator. Oral sex, finger penetration (never the use of toys which to her represented artifice) and ‘queer’ closeness, or vagina-on-vagina touching, were all part of her sexual repertoire.