Anne was besotted with Eliza’s beauty; thirty years and countless lovers later, she still called her the most beautiful girl I ever saw.19 Anne helped Eliza, who preferred French and drawing, with mathematics. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that the two of them were put in the same room. Or perhaps the staff wanted to set apart two girls who did not really fit in. Whatever the case, Anne and Eliza came to enjoy the isolation of their room. My conduct & feelings being surely natural to me inasmuch as they were not taught, not fictitious but instinctive.20 I had always had the same turn from infancy [...]. I had never varied & no effort on my part had been able to counteract it.21
Eliza and Anne swore to stay united forever. They planned to live together as soon as Eliza came into her inheritance in six years’ time. The girls exchanged rings to seal their promise. They were reluctant to be parted in the holidays, the two of them staying with Anne’s parents in a rented house in Halifax – Skelfler is not the neat place that it used to be.22 By this time, Jeremy had left the army. Eliza was given a friendly welcome by Anne’s family. As at Manor School, Anne and Eliza shared a room and a bed at the Listers’ house, not only for practical reasons. Early nineteenth-century society was obsessed with virginity, and thought girls were best protected from male seduction by a close female friend, who would engage their hearts and occupy their beds. This parental panic granted girls and women like Anne Lister and Eliza Raine a great many liberties.
3 First page of Anne Lister’s diary, which begins in August 1806 with a list of letters exchanged with Eliza. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, SH: 7/ML/E/26.
After spending the summer holidays together, only Eliza returned to Manor School. Anne is said to have been expelled, although there is no evidence of this. Perhaps Aunt Anne could no longer pay the fees for her niece. Until the girls could meet again, they agreed to write regular letters. To make sure every letter arrived and did not fall into the wrong hands, Anne kept a record of their correspondence. This list was the beginning of her diary.
Monday August 11 Eliza left us. Had a letter from her on Wednesday morning by Mr Ratcliffe. Wrote to her on Thursday 14th by Mr Lund. Wrote to her again on Sunday 17th – put into the Post Office at Leeds on the Monday following – that Evening the 18th had a parcel from her – Music, Letter & Lavender.23
Without Eliza, Anne consoled herself with her favourite brother Samuel over the daily disagreeables that forever beset our unfortunate family.24 Anne loved to pit herself against Sam, two years her junior, in ‘masculine’ arts: chess, fencing with wooden swords, or translating from Latin. She would always win. In the end, though, thirteen-year-old Samuel and eleven-year-old John returned to their boarding school in Bradford. Intending for one of them to inherit Shibden Hall, Uncle James paid their school fees to ensure they got a good education.
Anne received lessons from the Halifax theologian Samuel Knight in the autumn of 1806, learning algebra, rhetoric and classical languages – all subjects befitting a budding gentleman, but not a young girl. While practising the Greek alphabet, she occasionally wrote the dates and times in the list of letters to and from Eliza in Greek letters, for instance ‘Συνδαι Νοον’ for ‘Sunday noon’.25 That October, she wrote her first English note in Greek letters, about her correspondence with Eliza, her studies with Mr Knight and her menstruation.
4 Letter from Anne Lister to Eliza Raine, 21 February 1808. Anne Lister’s handwriting was less easy to decipher in her later diaries. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, SH: 7/ML/A/8.
Anne learned Greek with the New Testament, but as early as 1807, she was studying Demosthenes and a year later Homer, Xenophon and Sophocles; she also read Horace’s Latin odes. The Classics interested her not only because they were part of young men’s curricula; Anne soon noticed that classical literature exalted in (and laughed at) eroticism and desire in all its forms, without Christian moralising. The translations of her time censored what was considered obscene, so Anne had no other option but to read Greek and Latin poetry in the original. During her reading, she drew up a list26 of explanations of words such as clitoris, paedophile, eunuch, hermaphrodite and tribade. In Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–1697, published in English in 1738), she came across an entry on Sappho: You must know that [...] her amorous passion extended even to the persons of her own sex. According to Lucian, Bayle wrote, the women of the Isle of Lesbos [...] were very subject to this passion and Sappho had been made infamous by the island’s young maids.27 Anne found Bayle’s extensive articles most interesting28 and systematically followed his references to Horace, Juvenal and Martial.
The latter wrote two infamous epigrams on women who desire women, for instance on a certain Bassa, who acted chaste and unapproachable in public but secretly fucked women; no other verb would fit the original, in which Bassa penetrates other women with her prodigiosa Venus,29 her prodigious clitoris. Anne understood it to be a dildo, something she’d also come across in classical texts.30 Another of Martial’s epigrams deals with a woman named Philaenis,
rougher than a husband’s hard-on,
she sticks it to eleven girls a day.
She tucks up her skirt and plays handball,
gets covered in the wrestlers’ yellow sand
and easily curls weights that queer guys would find heavy.
Smeared with the dust of the wrestling ring,
she gets worked over hard by her oiled-up trainer;
and she won’t eat dinner or recline at the table before she’s
thrown up a good six pints of unmixed wine;
which she thinks it’s alright to come back to,
once she’s wolfed down sixteen rib-eyes.
When she’s done with all this, she sates her lust,
she doesn’t suck cock – that’s not macho enough for her –
instead she absolutely gobbles up girls’ middles.
May the gods bring you to your senses, Philaenis,
for thinking it macho to lick cunt.31
Nowhere else could a respectable English girl read anything like that in the early nineteenth century. Anne Lister did not let the implicit misogyny of ancient Greece and Rome trouble her. To her, ‘Bassa’ and ‘Philaenis’ verified the existence of women who desired women, confirming her own feelings. She used Martial’s erotic poetry as intended, reading the books ‘with one hand’, as Rousseau put it. The margins of several diary entries dealing with her reading of classical texts are annotated with an ‘X’ for masturbation.32 Some poems incurred a cross,33 as she called it.
Euphoric from her readings, Anne implored Eliza to learn Latin and Greek as well. She cobbled together a doggerel poem for her (All hail! thou beauteous charming fair), singing amazonian praise to Eliza as a poet male: like the ancient man-less warrior women, she told Eliza
Thy needle, distaff, puddings, and thy pies
Thy much liked cheesecakes and thy curds despise
urging her instead to study grammar and vocabulary, and gain an erotic education from Anacreon, Vergil and Horace: With these acquirements thou wilt lovers gain.34
Eliza had other matters on her plate. Her sister Jane thought she had found the perfect man in a certain Henry Boulton. He had been in Calcutta, shared Jane’s love of India and wanted to return there as soon as possible. Boulton was his father’s fourth son and so, like Jeremy Lister, had no hope of an inheritance and had to seek his fortune in the military. Despite her foster father William Duffin’s dire warnings, Jane married Boulton in May of 1808 and sailed for India with him.
In her letters to Anne, Eliza vented her rage over men’s depravity. Anne responded with an anecdote about Mme Théroigne de Méricourt; this ‘Amazon of the French Revolution’ had fought to arm women and had made use of her own weapons. She was a young fanatical girl who would have been one of the finest women in France had she less despised those softer graces and winning charms which she really eminently possessed, insomuch that one young man was so fond of her as to offer marriage upon
which she put a pistol to his breast and threatened to shoot him if he ever mentioned the subject again.35
Eliza came to Halifax at the end of that July and helped the Listers to move house. The family could no longer afford their home and had to move to a smaller property on the northern edge of the town. Samuel ridiculed his sister Anne’s tiny new room as a kennel.36 Eliza moved into the small space with her, and the two seventeen-year-olds were very happy there, at all times of the day: felix 8 o’clock or felix afternoon,37 Anne noted. Inspired by her study of classical languages, she invented her first cipher.
Anne assumed that the loose sheets she used for writing would arouse curiosity. They would not be safe from the eyes of others, even in a locked drawer. If she wanted to write down all her thoughts and experiences without exception, she had to find hiding places in the language or the script she used. Her mother Rebecca had no Latin, but her brother Samuel could have guessed at what lay behind ‘felix’. That summer, Anne composed her secret code. Although few people in her immediate surroundings could decipher the Greek letters in which she had written some entries in the past, they still weren’t really secure. Anne therefore abandoned the simple phonetic transcription of English words into the Greek alphabet and instead allocated several letters randomly: instead of ‘h’ she wrote ‘θ’ (theta), and ‘l’ became ‘δ’ (delta).38 Eliza taught herself the code and used it for her diary as well, which she began to keep at Anne’s suggestion.
A little later, Anne perfected her code by adding mathematical symbols and invented characters for individual letters, omitting gaps between the words and also replacing entire words with only one cipher. She was proud of her secret script for the almost impossibility of its being deciphered & the facility with which I wrote.39
After these happy days in the ‘kennel’, in September 1808 Anne accompanied Eliza to Scarborough, where her uncle James Raine lived with his wife and four young children. Trips to stay with relatives or friends were the only travel the impecunious young women could undertake. Anne and Eliza spent three weeks in Yorkshire’s then most sophisticated coastal resort, the first of its kind. Back in Halifax, Anne introduced Eliza to her piano pupil, Maria Alexander. There was much flirting between the three. In the end, Anne confessed to Maria that she was in love, but didn’t say with whom. She might have meant Eliza – or perhaps Maria. As Anne’s diary reveals, after tea at Eliza’s instigation I had Miss A on my knee, kissed her.40 Did Anne and Eliza let Maria in on their secret? Did Eliza feel so sure of her Anne that she did not begrudge her a flirtation? Or was Anne lying in her diary, and the kiss was not Eliza’s suggestion? There is no reason to assume she was always entirely honest with herself. Embellishment and self-deception are among the pitfalls, if not the prerequisites, of every diary.
During the spring of 1809, the exchange of letters between Anne and Eliza grew less regular. That kiss between Anne and her student seems not to have been without consequences. To her father’s annoyance, Anne spent a great deal of time with Maria Alexander and her lower-class family. As regards her relationship with Eliza, she did not feel any pangs of guilt. My mind was the most convenient, capacious concern possible. It admitted new impressions without crowding or incommoding old ones & that all things keep their proper places.41 While whispering sweet nothings to Maria Alexander, she versified to Eliza –
But fondle thee I must and will
Thou art best loved by me,
For tho’ my heart thou wound’st still
No friend have I but thee.42
and practised the rhetoric of love in her rare letters to her first beloved. In sweet moonlight, the murmur of a stream brought to mind a thousand pleasing scenes of Eliza. Here I turn my eyes to my bed. This I hope after a few years, which confidence in your affection will shorten, you will share with me and thus complete my worldly wishes. Anne sent the page only half filled. Eliza understood the invitation and wrote below Anne’s lines that she did not know how to pass the time until she could be united with Anne entirely. I will always tell thee every thought and every remnant of desire, and will not my W do the same?43 The ‘W’ stands for ‘Welly’, a nickname Eliza had given Anne after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who had conquered India just as Anne had conquered Eliza.
Eliza sensed that something had changed between them. To get closer to her lover again, she persuaded her foster father William Duffin to invite Anne to York for the winter concert and ball season and to bring them out together as debutantes. This prospect was all the more compelling for Anne in her very modest circumstances as she was arguing more than ever with her parents. Her father would not tolerate his now marriageable daughter roaming the streets and fields alone, especially not at the dead of night. Anne had even visited a certain Captain Bourne in his rooms to have him show her his pistols; those who do not know her judge from this, wrote a lady from Halifax, with regret, for she is such a pleasant companion that I myself could have listened to her till I had forgot it.44
Very much looking forward to her stay, Anne announced her arrival for 1 December 1809. I promise neither to alarm you with sword or pistols or Orpheus like to draw away the very house with music. No flutes, no fifes, no drums shall disturb you on my account, no neighbourhood shall be kept in awe by my skirmishing. She wrote forthrightly to Eliza about her excitement to be in the same room with you, and rejoiced that soon, very soon I hope to tell you in a more pleasing manner all that better suits my tongue than my pen. I long to impress upon your lips all that real sincerity and warmth of affection which come but frigidly on paper.45
In the first five weeks, Anne and Eliza enjoyed the season in York. The Roman city was considered the capital of the North. While Bradford, Leeds and Manchester grew in industrial significance and size over the coming decades, York remained the historical, cultural, administrative, civic, ecclesiastical and military centre. Visitors flocked from afar to attend its concerts, exhibitions, balls and galas. Anne and Eliza saw the primadonna assoluta Angelica Catalani on 22 December, who was then the toast of England, in fact of all Europe. For the first time, Anne Lister got a taste of the big wide world.
At the start of 1810, influenza brought the season crashing to an end. Although she had fallen ill herself, Anne hurried back to Halifax, where the family feared for her brother John’s life. She nursed him and shared night watches with Samuel. John died a week later, on 24 January 1810, shortly before his fifteenth birthday. Samuel was now the only male heir to the Listers of Shibden Hall.
Having treated herself with mustard plasters for her infection, Anne returned to Eliza and the Duffins in York. A month later, however, the girls had to part again. After completing her schooling and until marrying, Eliza had to live with a sickly and irritable cousin thirty-five years her senior in Doncaster, according to her father’s will. Lady Crawfurd insisted on Eliza coming, as William Raine had granted her a pension of £170 a year if she took in his daughter. She could use the money, as since divorcing her husband she had been living on £130 a year in alimony. Although Eliza had vowed to get along well with her cousin, arguments broke out after only a week. Constantly teazing it and showing anger, vexation, nay, spite upon me when any thing domestic or otherwise occurred the least contrary to her wish.46 Eliza now understood why her sister, who had also had to live with Lady Crawfurd after leaving school, had been in such haste to marry.
Jane’s marriage, meanwhile, had failed. As soon as Henry Boulton had set himself up in business in Calcutta with his wife’s £4,000, he threw her out on her ear. She returned to England with no money and no chaperone. The journey took her nine months. By the time she set foot on English soil she was pregnant. Had she been raped on the way or had she been forced to prostitute herself? For society, the difference was of as little interest as the injustice Henry Boulton had visited on her. She was the one to be ostracised. Eliza implored Anne to intercede with Mr Duffin on her sister’s behalf. In the end he did ensure she could give birth at the home of a friend of his; yet
Jane was never to show her face in York again, and Eliza and Anne were told to avoid her.
In her involuntary Doncaster exile, Eliza felt at times dull for want of your society. She wrote letter after letter to Anne, begging for at least brief epistles47 from her dear Lister, as she now called her ‘husband’. I have felt greatly & deeply disappointed at your forgetfulness of me, Eliza complained; if you have any consideration for my feelings, answer me by return of post, tell me why I am thus forgotten.48 This long and urgent letter elicited the response from Anne that she had not received any post from Eliza. Eliza saw through Anne’s lie, but wrote: when I cease to love you, I cease to live.49
As arranged, Anne arrived for a visit to Doncaster on 30 April 1810. Only four days later, Lady Crawfurd suspected Anne and Eliza of acting together in some deep plot against her. Even years later, Lady Crawfurd was to refer to Anne as the devil incarnate.50 Anne abandoned her stay after only a week. That occurrence believe me dear L has given me more pain than all the accumulation of insults & ungovernable rage directed to myself.51 Following an icy silence, Eliza told Lady Crawfurd on 10 May of her determination of leaving her which she interrupted by saying she was not against it.52
But where was she to go? Back in York, Anne described Eliza’s ordeal with Lady Crawfurd to Mr Duffin. In Halifax, she turned to her old teacher Miss Mellin, asking for a place at her school for Eliza, including bed and board. Anne did everything to help Eliza, and at the same time to get rid of her elegantly.
Isabella
1810–1813
While Eliza waited nervously to be delivered from Lady Crawfurd in Doncaster, she had an inkling of the reason behind the sudden paucity of Anne’s letters. Has York, my dear friend, banished me from your recollection? I cannot believe it. Nothing I hope will make you careless of giving me pleasure; you can little know what pain you have given me.1 What Eliza apprehensively called ‘York’ was really named Isabella Norcliffe. She was six years older than Anne and came from a respected wealthy family. Her great passion was for the theatre. Isabella attended every new production and her talents for the stage are certainly first-rate.2 On one occasion she acted out for Anne how the famous Talma had played Hamlet. Isabella’s natural habitat, however, was the countryside. ‘Tib’, as she was nicknamed, was a good horsewoman who could cover the fifteen miles from York to the Norcliffes’ country house, Langton Hall, in a morning’s ride; she was also expert at driving coaches. Isabella’s favourite activity was an early-morning hunt with just her father – she is the image of her father in everything3 – but she also enjoyed larger hunts. I have taken entirely to coursing, & can think or dream of nothing but horses hares & Greyhounds. [...] I have had no falls yet, & consequently am very courageous.4 Like Anne, who slept with a pistol under her pillow, Isabella loved firearms. Our dispositions harmonize particularly, Anne noted; there was a strong natural resemblance between us.5
Gentleman Jack Page 2