by Anne Choma
In the name of civility, Anne encouraged Miss Walker to extend their visit to Mrs Edwards, in spite of a ‘huffy letter’ Ann had recently received from her relative. Anne noted with pleasure in her diary Miss Walker’s willingness to follow her advice: ‘[she] seems inclined to consult me and tell me all’.
By 5.30pm, the carriage was back at Shibden Hall. Miss Walker departed for Lidgate, and, within ten minutes, Anne was out of her smart pelisse, back in her work clothes, and in the fresh air. A few days later, Ann Walker left for her holiday. She was not to return to Yorkshire until 25th September.
Anne Lister was confident she would not be forgotten during their separation. By effectively acting as Ann’s chaperone, she had taken a valuable opportunity to step visibly into Miss Walker’s life and society. For Ann Walker, who until very recently had had to be content with observing her charismatic neighbour from a distance, the trip was excitingly intimate. For both women, the public show of unity marked a new phase in the relationship. Anne was living by her motto: ‘the woman that deliberates is lost.’
Two days after Ann Walker left for the Lake District, Anne ‘incurred a cross’ while thinking about her. It marked the first time she had used the phrase about her. Always recorded in crypt-hand at the top of the day’s diary entry, this was Anne’s preferred way to describe an orgasm she had achieved by masturbation. It was frequently used in conjunction with the name of her current or would-be lover, and sometimes followed with the specification that she had been thinking of that woman ‘merely as a mistress’.
Without an accessible language of female sexual pleasure to draw on, Anne had devised an idiosyncratic lexicon by which to record her sexual activity. ‘Grubbling’ meant using her hands to bring another woman to orgasm. A ‘kiss’ was another word for orgasm, and ‘going to Italy’ referred to making love or having full sex.
Anne was a confident and experienced lover of women. The sexual preference she records in her diary is characterised by a desire to give her partners pleasure before taking her own. She displayed a deep interest in their arousal and preferred to touch than to be touched. Though her partners would also initiate lovemaking, Anne felt comfortable when taking the dominant role during sex.
Anne enjoyed the company of women, indeed, her social life was overwhelmingly female. In some ways, the forced secrecy of her lesbianism worked to her advantage and without it she would not, as she recognised, have been so free to pursue platonic or intimate friendships with women.
However, in a society in which she was not able to openly express her desires, finding a sexual partner was challenging, and could be dangerous. Advances had to be made carefully and incrementally; with so much that couldn’t be said it was difficult to gauge how each woman would respond to her courtship. Her diaries reveal only two women as having a similar sexual identity to her own. These two ‘regular oddities’, which from the detailed description contained in Anne’s journals we might read today as butch lesbians, were Isabella Norcliffe and Miss Pickford. Like Anne, they had expressed a disinclination ever to marry a member of the opposite sex.
Anne could safely assume that same-sex love would be an alien concept to Miss Walker. She had no reason to speculate on her previous sexual experiences. But it is likely that Ann Walker, though she had lived a sheltered existence at Lidgate, would have heard rumours of Anne Lister’s liking for women. The cloak of incomprehension that existed around female same-sex desire did not render Anne Lister’s ‘oddity’ completely invisible.
If Ann Walker had heard rumours, it did not impede her desire to pursue the friendship. She arranged to take breakfast with Anne as soon as she returned from Wastwater on 25th September.
But Anne Lister was aware of the speculation that could follow her close friendships with women, and was eager to protect Ann Walker’s reputation as well as her own. Over the coming months, as their liaison deepened, she would try hard to deflect the attention of others. This would be an onerous task, given the keen spread of local gossip, and with Ann Walker’s many relatives keeping a close eye on her every move, and fortune.
‘A little of politics – the people not a bit more contented for the Reform Bill – now want to be rid of the national debt’
On 9th September 1832, Anne heard that Vere Cameron had received a title. Lady Stuart had written to tell her that ‘his majesty had granted Vere and her sisters to take the rank of Earl’s daughters’ and that consequently, Vere was now a Lady too. Swiftly writing to congratulate the new Lady Cameron, Anne’s tone was affectionate. ‘All is now right – everything seems to go well with you. My dearest Vere, I am quite happy for your sake, and know not that I have one wish concerning you unsatisfied.’
If sincere, the letter reflects that a change of heart had occurred in the time since Hastings. Continuing, Anne was able to thank Vere for ‘her discretion’ and applaud her for staying faithful to ‘her own very self’. She went so far as to look inwards, at the ‘less proper grain of my own nature’, to help explain what had gone wrong at Pelham Crescent. Whether Anne’s recovery from the disappointment of Vere’s rejection was as complete as she wanted to project, her desire to maintain a friendship with Lady Cameron was heartfelt.
Besides, she saw no reason to lose contact with Vere’s high-society connections. In a correspondence with Vere’s half-sister Lady Harriet de Hageman – whom she was keen to visit at home in Copenhagen – Anne celebrated the happiness of the newly married couple:
Thought Mr Cameron’s place on the banks of Lochiel one of the most beautiful situations in the Highlands – Vere will be the Laird’s wife, My Lady of Lochiel, head of the Camerons, and quite a personage in Scotland – the people think of him with something like adoration – many a bonfire on many a hill will greet Vere’s arrival, and I do believe she will be happy.
9TH SEPTEMBER 1832
Despite Anne’s frequent assertions that she had no interest in it, the subject of political reform was one which arose in her letters to both Vere and her half-sister. To Vere, she confided her fears of ‘a bad prospect for the winter . . . A fearful number of people have turned out for increase of wages . . . they vow vengeance against the machinery’. To Lady Harriet, she wrote ‘A little of politics – the people not a bit more contented for the Reform Bill – now want to be rid of the national debt’.
Anne’s anti-radical and anti-reform views were shared by her high-ranking friends. James Wortley, related to Vere via her great aunt Lady Stuart, would soon be standing as Tory MP for Halifax. He would become a familiar name in the pages of Anne’s diary in 1835 as she vociferously supported his bid for election.
The 9th September was a busy day in Anne’s correspondence. Writing to Dr Belcombe, she admitted that she had forgotten to take the remedy prescribed for her ‘intestinal torpor’, but joked that it would have to wait ‘till my out-of-door jobs are done, and I have leisure enough to make myself ill enough by thinking about it’.
There was word that day from Steph’s sister, too. Mariana Lawton, currently staying in Brighton, wrote to Anne with the news that she may have found her a new lady’s maid:
Met with a person . . . Eugenie Pierre, at 23, lived with Lady Herbert . . . wage 23 guineas . . . does not associate with common servants but always civil and attentive to them . . . not smart but always neat and clean, and very tidy and methodical . . . Brighton very full and gay, but Charles does not like it.
9TH SEPTEMBER 1832
After a protracted search, here, finally, was a servant who might fulfil Anne’s criteria. Mariana knew that a faculty for foreign languages was a prerequisite in a servant who would complement her friend’s wanderlust, and here she had gone one further by producing a French native.
By this time, Anne’s dream travel plans had expanded beyond Europe – France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Denmark – to include further-flung destinations like Algiers and Niagara Falls. She had recently told M
ariana that she felt it against her nature to be tied to one place, and instead was fated ‘to wander on the face of the earth, the where and how, never to be fixed till the last moment’ (20TH JANUARY 1832). The question that began to cross her mind was whether Miss Walker might suit her as a travelling companion.
For the moment though, Anne had more pressing domestic concerns. She was worried about Aunt Anne, who had been suffering from painful spasms in her joints, and began thinking about fitting up Shibden’s downstairs north parlour as a more accessible bedroom for her. Though she didn’t share Marian and Rachel Hemingway’s gloomy view that the 67-year-old would ‘hardly get over next spring’, her aunt was elderly by the standards of the day. Extended periods of travel were out of the question, at least until she could be assured of Aunt Anne’s recovery.
Anne took advantage of Miss Walker’s absence in the Lake District to deal with the time-consuming vexations her tenants presented. On the morning of 10th September, Mr Dodgson came to dish the dirt on Mr Kirton of Lower Place. Kirton, Dodgson reported, had been selling off valuable clover from his land to Mr Carr. Stopping only to deal with a dead cow at the bottom of Hall Croft (‘had got a grave dug 5ft deep and had almost dragged (by 2 horses) the carcass into it’) which she then insisted on having dissected to establish the cause of its death, Anne set off to see her solicitor and tell him ‘what Kirton was about’.
Standing over him as he wrote, she demanded Mr Adam issue a summons, threatening that ‘If he [Kirton] did not immediately make a compensation for the clover he had sold off, and if he sold anything else contrary to the covenants of his lease, I should commence an action against him.’
The following day, Kirton came to make amends. He claimed that he ‘Did not mean to defraud me – had sold four little loads of clover, but would bring back as much manure – wanted the privilege of selling on this condition’.
Anne did not grant this request, and told Kirton that he must stick to the tenancy agreement he had made with her. Pleased that his intervention had allowed her to act so swiftly, she took Dodgson further into her confidence, asking him to ‘keep a good look out, and tell me if anything more was sold off’ (11TH SEPTEMBER 1832).
The week presented other challenges. John Oates insisted on keeping his gate open, allowing George Pickles to access it as a free, public cart road, to Anne’s annoyance. Having set Oates right on the matter, Anne was happy to move on to the subject of blowpipes – a contemporary tool used to ignite a flame:
John thought that for 2 or 3 pounds he could make me a portable one (reservoir of air like that for air gun and filled in the same way), all to go in a box of 6 inch square – one reservoir full would keep up a strong and regular blast for ¼ hour.
12TH SEPTEMBER 1832
Anne liked Oates’s idea and wondered if his invention might come in handy for the stove that was being fitted in her new library passage. Her chaumière was almost complete too. What with this, and the ‘long chair’ at the bottom of Calf Croft, the place was, finally, starting to look a bit more elegant.
‘French femmes de chambre seldom famed for discretion, or the adventurous spirit of travelling, or understanding or being interested in the common run of English character, much less one like mine – but Eugenie might be superior to all the rest’
Anne was optimistic about the prospect of Eugenie Pierre as a lady’s maid, but characteristically thorough in her considerations. She replied to Mariana that, while it certainly sounded as if Eugenie ‘might have sense, might suit me’, she would feel more confident if ‘M had seen her, or Lady Stuart had seen her, or I had seen her’. In spite of, or perhaps because of, her Francophile leanings, some of Anne’s reservations were related to Eugenie’s nationality: ‘She would either leave me in 6 months, or, as most tolerably well-bred French women could do, talk me into what she pleased.’ Anne had flirted with a number of French women over the years. At least Eugenie was from Normandy, ‘the most English part of France’.
Anne was keen to ensure that Eugenie possessed the other qualities she saw as essential in a maid. ‘Her age, family and native place in her favour, but her health must be good. She must like travelling, travel outside, and have upon her mind to make no difficulties.’ She would need to receive more details before deciding either way. Perhaps, she replied, Mariana would know ‘better what to do’ than she.
The ‘dirty business’ of coal remained on Anne’s mind. The pits she saw springing up across the Shibden Valley – the vestiges of which can be felt today in place names like Pit Hill, Spiggs and Lands Head – were a constant reminder of her land’s untapped potential. In a dynamic industry that was growing exponentially (and that was yet to wake up to the plight of its workers) Anne’s preoccupation, like that of her industrialist peers, was profit.
Anne knew that before she could make any serious money, she had to decide exactly how to exploit her coal beds. Frustratingly, weeks after his visit to the Hall, she was still to hear from Jeremiah Rawson about the £226.17.6 per acre she had set for their potential lease.
Mr Holdsworth, a local man from whom Anne had recently purchased a quantity of stone, arrived at Shibden on 22nd September with some interesting information. The Rawson brothers, said Holdsworth, who leased his own quarry from Christopher and Jeremiah, were already mining coal dangerously close to Shibden land. Christopher, he went on, ‘had bought Mr Hall’s coal for £1,000 . . . had bought it very cheap at a thousand, and Mr R never said a word but gave the price at once . . . they were getting all they could on the top of the hill . . . they must be getting very near my [Anne’s] land now’.
Anne digested the implications of this information. She had been warned that trespass and theft were commonplace among competitors in the cut-throat mining industry. She would not put anything past Christopher and Jeremiah Rawson.
While this was going on, Anne’s rolling programme of estate improvements needed urgent funding. The precarious state of her finances is clear from a letter she drafted on 23rd September, in which she wondered if her friend, Mrs Norcliffe, could be a candidate ‘to help me out with a hundred pounds for the last month or two of the year if I wanted it’.
Anne was close to Mrs Norcliffe as well as her daughter, Isabella (Tib). She was frequently and enthusiastically welcomed as a visitor to the Norcliffes’ North Yorkshire home, Langton Hall. It is likely that Mrs Norcliffe would have obliged Anne’s request willingly, had she not, in the end, ‘determined not to send the letter’. Mrs Norcliffe was elderly, and Anne had begun to have doubts about how the whole thing would look. The money would have to be found somewhere else.
Optimistically, Anne pressed on with her improvements. The next project – one she had been considering for some time – was to build a road through a thick, wooded area at the back of Shibden Hall called the Trough of Bolland. It would provide access to the hall from the newly constructed Godley Road – an important public access route which now connected Halifax to places like Leeds, Hebden Bridge and Manchester. Major excavation would be required for Anne’s road, but George Pickles had given Anne hope that the work could be done for a good price:
He said he could make it for 100/ less than Washington . . . 30/ a rood, 14ft wide, and put a foot of boulder on it . . . Mr W said he durst engage to make it for £300 . . . Told Pickles if he could manage to do it at 30/ a rood thought I should not hesitate much about having it done.
22ND SEPTEMBER 1832
A few days later, Anne was struck with another bolt of design inspiration, this time for major renovation inside the house. She told her father she had ‘a new idea and the best on the subject that had occurred to me yet’: to ‘move the hall stairs altogether and turn them up the little buttery and to come out in that part of my father’s room that is over it, and so be lighted from the north or west as one chose’.
In reality, Anne would not have the resources to carry out this work (the benefit of which can
be seen in Shibden Hall today) until several years later. In 1832, though he may have recognised the over-ambitious nature of her plans, Jeremy voiced no objection. At eighty, he was resigned to his energetic daughter’s determination to bring about change.
‘Miss W and I very cosy and confidential . . . she said she knew not when she had spent so pleasant a day and I believe her’
The day after Miss Walker returned from the Lake District, Anne joined her for breakfast at Lidgate. She strode the few miles across the fields briskly, pausing just long enough to order Joseph Pickles ‘To pursue and kill game and rabbits for and during this present season of hunting and shooting, and to proceed against all persons found trespassing on the estate in my name and on my behalf’ (26TH SEPTEMBER 1832).
Once there, she stayed talking with Ann for an hour and a half. ‘Very civil, our conversation quite confidential’, she wrote in satisfaction to her journal afterwards. She was touched to find that Miss Walker had brought back a ‘presse papier’ (paper weight) from the marble works at Kendal as a gift for her. ‘We really get on very well – yet she said she could not go to Italy.’ In this instance, Anne’s ‘going to Italy’ was meant literally, rather than as a sexual reference. But, demonstrating as it did Miss Walker’s indisposition to the idea of foreign travel, the answer remained a cause for concern. Anne put the matter on ice for now.
Just ten minutes after she arrived back at Shibden that morning, Anne found Miss Walker’s servant, James Mackenzie, at her door. He had come, he said, to collect some books which Anne had forgotten to bring to Lidgate for Miss Walker. Anne scribbled back a note, offering ‘a thousand apologies’ for her oversight, and sent Mackenzie away with them at once.