Appendix 1 Who's Who in Anne Lister's Diary

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’My mind on paper’: Anne Lister and literary
self-construction in early-nineteenth-century Halifax
Thesis
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Rowanchild, Anira (2000). ’My mind on paper’: Anne Lister and literary self-construction in early-nineteenth-
century Halifax. PhD thesis The Open University.
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Abstract
Anne Lister (1791-1840), a provincial gentlewoman of Shibden Hall, near Halifax in the
West Riding of Yorkshire, produced between 1806 and her death a four-million-word diary
documenting her daily life, intimate thoughts, ambitions, sexual and emotional adventures
with women and her musings on the nature of her sexuality. About a sixth is written in
cipher.
Lister scholarship so far has focused mainly on the social and cultural implications of
her writings. This thesis, however, examines the diary as a literary text and considers
Lister's deployment of literary forms and structures, strategies and conventions in
producing a sense of self. It explores her relationship to contemporary ideas of authorship
and to notions of public and private, and investigates the impact of reading in the
autobiographical writing of Lister and her circle and the significance of the cipher in her
social and sexual self-representation. It asks whether her literary production helped
accommodate her self-representation as a traditional country gentlewoman with her
unconventional sexuality.
The linking theme throughout the thesis, bringing together the many different aspects of
Lister's self-fashioning, is the significance of literary considerations in her diary and
letters. It begins the work of investigating the literary structures and strategies of her
writings, and offers a fresh perspective on this remarkable work of literary self-
construction.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to the following people for their interest, help, advice, support and
encouragement: my supervisors, Hilary Hinds and Cicely Havely; Julie Preston; Bea and
Dan Nichol; Frank and Joan Turner; Joe Bristow and Hazel Hanson.
I would also like to thank Pat Sewell and staff at Calderdale Archives and Reference
Library, Halifax; North Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton; the University of
Birmingham Library, and Peter Holliday and staff at Leominster Public Library.
Ill
Note on text and abbreviations
Abbreviations
CR: Letters and Papers of Henrietta Matilda Crompton and her Family, North
Yorkshire Record Office, Northallerton, North Yorkshire.
SH: The Diaries and Letters of Anne Lister, Shibden Hall Muniments, Calderdale
Archives, Halifax, West Yorkshire.
RAM: Phyllis Ramsden Papers, Calderdale Archives, Halifax, West Yorkshire.
Text of Anne Lister's Diary and Correspondence
I have taken the quotations from Anne Lister's diary and letters that appear in this thesis
from the following sources: Helena Whitbread's two selections of transcriptions from the
diary, I Know My Own Heart: Anne Lister 's Diaries 1791-1840 (1988), and No Priest But
Love: The Journals ofAnne Lister 1824-1826(1992); Jill Liddington's study, Presenting
the Past: Anne Lister of Haliflix 1 791-1840 (1994), which contains some brief passages of
transcription, and Liddington's selection of transcriptions in Female Fortune: Land,
Gender and Authority: The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833-36 (1998);
transcriptions by Hazel Brothers in her essay, 'Framing the Shibden Hall Portraits: A
Commission Fulfilled by Anne Lister during an Awkward Stay in London, 1833' (1996).
All other quotations are taken from my own transcriptions of the original manuscripts
housed in the Shibden Hall Muniments, Calderdale Archives, Halifax. These are referred
to throughout the study by their record numbers in the Muniments, and where these do not
iv
indicate a specific page of manuscript, a date is given in the text, or in parenthesis, as in,
for example: (SH: 7IM1JE, 3 November 1816).
Anne Lister and Eliza Raine used a cipher in parts of their diaries and letters. I have
distinguished transcriptions from encrypted material by italicizing them. This is a
procedure also observed by Liddington. Brothers marks encrypted passages by enclosing
them within the symbols < ... > , but for consistency, I have italicized these in this study.
Whitbread does not signal the appearance of encrypted script, and in the case of quotations
from this source, I have been unable to distinguish plaintext from enciphered text.
V
Contents
Page number

Acknowledgements
1

Notes on text and abbreviations
111

Contents
V

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: 'Ambition in the literary way': The Wnterly Author 21

Chapter 2: 'Books! Ye are my spirit's oil': The Readerly Author 73

Chapter 3: 'Peculiar writing': The Encrypted Author 117

Chapter 4: Love and 'erotics': The Amatory Author 161
Chapter 5: 'Acquiring more importance': The Relational Author and

the Social Self 209

Conclusion 255

Appendix 1: Who's Who in Anne Lister's Diary 267

Appendix 2: Anne Lister Chronology 273

Appendix 3: Key to Anne Lister's Crypt Hand 277

Appendix 4: Figure 1: Example of Anne Lister's crypt hand writing 279
vi
Figure 2: Example of Eliza Raine's crypt hand writing 281
Figure 3: Example of Anne Lister's plaintext handwriting 283
Figure 4: Sample entry from Anne Lister's diary 285

Appendix 5: Figure 1: Portrait of Anne Lister 287

Figure 2: Shibden Hall in 1835 289
Figure 3: Design for Improvements to Shibden Hall, 1836 291

Figure 4: Shibden Hall today 293
Bibliography 295
Introduction
In August 1816, Anne Lister, a gentlewoman of the West Riding of Yorkshire, stayed at
Buxton, the famous Derbyshire spa. She was on her way to visit her dearest friend,
Marianna, who had recently married Charles Lawton, of Lawton Hall, Cheshire. She was
accompanied by Marianna's sister, Anne Belcombe. Lister was twenty-five and Belcombe
six years older. During the day the two women bathed in the curative waters, walked on
the promenades, met with acquaintances and fussed about the state of their laundiy. At
night they shared a bed, a routine practice for genteel women on a tight budget. One night,
15 August, according to her diary, Lister confessed to Belcombe of having a 'partiality to
the ladies', although the next she hurriedly 'contradicted all' (SH: 7/MIlE). Later that
year, Belcombe stayed with Lister at her home, Shibden Hall, just outside Halifax, and the
matter was broached again. While once more they passed their days in the peaceful visits,
walks, and gossip typical of women of polite society, their nights together in bed were
altogether more eventful. Lister reiterated to Belcombe her 'penchant for the ladies', and
now 'expatiated on the nature of my feelings towards her and hers towards me'. Such a
declaration rapidly led her to attempt 'great lengths' of physical intimacy with Belcombe,
'such as feeling her all over pushing my finger up her etc.'. But when Lister 'asked her
several times to let me get nearer to her and have a proper kiss [bring her to orgasm]',
Belcombe declined the offer 'languidly' though 'as f she would by no means have disliked
it but as f she thought it right to refuse' (SH: 7/MLJE, 8 November 1816). Questioned by
Belcombe about the propriety of such behaviour, Lister 'urged in my own defence the
strength of natural feeling & instinct' (SH: 7/MIlE, 13 November 1816).
These amorous episodes are discreetly veiled by Lister's 'crypt hand' (Whitbread, 1988:
142), an idiosyncratic cipher she employed in about a sixth of the diary she kept from 1806
until her death in 1840. They epitomize the aspect of the diary that caused a sensation in
1988 when Helena Whitbread published her first selection from the encoded diary, I Know
Ai Own Heart: The Diaries ofAnne LEster 1 791-1840. Were these explicit lesbian sex
scenes truly the work of an early nineteenth-century woman? 1 Was a lesbian sexuality (as
we might think of it today) even possible in that period? This latter question has tended to
preoccupy critics and readers of I Know My Own Heart, and Whitbread's later selection of
transcripts, No Priest But Love (1992). Their response is scarcely surprising. The life
revealed in the extracts from Lister's encoded diary is shockingly at variance with what is
expected of a provincial lady of this period. In 1816, for example, the year that Lister 'went
great lengths' with Anne Belcombe, Jane Austen published Emma, a novel praised by Sir
Walter Scott for 'describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life'
(quoted in Tomalin, 1997: 252). This 'ordinary life' depicted by Austen was drawn from a
similar social milieu to that of Lister and Belcombe, the commercial, professional and
gentry families characterized by Amanda Vickery, in her study of Georgian women's lives,
as 'the genteel' (Vickery, 1998: 1). The fictional Emma Woodhouse is 'handsome, clever,
and rich'. Her father has 'an easy fortune' (Austen, 1966: 38), but her mother's death and
sister's marriage has left her 'mistress of [her father's] house from a very early period'
(Austen, 1966: 37).
Lister portrays herself in her diary as certainly clever, if not handsome. 2 In 1816 she was
not yet rich, although she would eventually come into her fortune. She was born in Halifax
in 1791 into a family of poor gentry. Her father, Jeremy Lister (1752-1836), was an army
'Jill Liddington cites Elizabeth Mayor as sceptical of the diary's authenticity (Liddington, 1998: xv & 253n).
2 See Appendix 5, figure 1, for a portrait of Anne Lister.