ANNE LISTER (1791-1840) was a Yorkshire landowner, traveler, and lesbian polymath. She was also a brilliant diarist, leaving 26 handwritten volumes (and uncounted numbers of loose pages, letters, reading extracts, and travel accounts) detailing her public and private life. All her manuscripts are held at the West Yorkshire Archive in Halifax. Her diaries alone contain an estimated five million words, partly in a “crypthand” code she devised for private reflections. Anne Lister’s best-known single sentence, from 29 January 1821, deserves all the kinds of attention it gets: “I love & only love the fairer sex & thus beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.” And it occurs on just one of (roughly) 7,722 pages of close writing, many of them still to be explored. Taken as a whole, Lister’s diaries represent probably the most sustained daily account in the archive of life-writing. They show us a matchless treasury of details about English provincial life in the early nineteenth century and the daily workings of a singularly engaged intellect. They also reveal how one sexually non-conforming woman thoughtfully analyzed the social, economic, emotional, and sexual challenges of what she called “my oddity” and chose to act with breathtaking resilience – in her everyday life and across the larger arc of that life. The rich granularity and temporal sweep of Lister’s journal give it almost unfathomable significance as both a historical resource and now an emerging masterpiece in the English literary tradition.

Two thoughtful volumes with selections from focused periods of the Lister diaries were published by Helena Whitbread in 1988 and 1992. Historians of sexuality under-engaged these materials (not to mention the massive archive behind them), not least because of enormous barriers to access at the time. On the one hand, Lister’s manuscript journals are massive; on the other, the coded sections must be painstakingly deciphered -- even as the highly abbreviated “plainhand” sections actually pose more challenges than Lister’s “crypthand.” These barriers to access are in the very midst of lifting. In 2019, English screenwriter and director Sally Wainwright OBE aired the first season of her BBC/HBO series on Lister, entitled Gentleman Jack. This made Anne Lister a global icon, and not only for an LGBTQ viewership. It resulted in the formation of the Anne Lister Society (co-founded by Wainwright and Laurie Shannon and holding its first conference in April 2022) and the University of York’s decision to name a new college after her in 2021. But the show’s success also funded the digitization of the entire journal, from 1816-1840. With this explosion of accessibility (though of course the difficulty reading the MS remains!), it is exactly the time for all new levels of critical attention to the Lister diaries -- and not only for their historical interest. The panelists here all explore Anne Lister as a (voracious) reader and note-taker, but also as a thinker and a writer of extraordinary prose.

This panel proposes that *reading* fueled Anne Lister’s extraordinary resilience in her cultural context to insist on living her life as she saw fit (including sustained engagements with several women and finally a marriage with Anne Walker in 1834, from which she proceeded apace with household life, estate management, and far-flung travels on the European continent). Each panelist has been to the archive to look at Lister’s reading extracts and also engages diary material beyond what was published in Whitbread’s (heroic) volumes. With these expanded resources, Amy Solomons will consider Lister’s wide reading and her practice of recording it, in both the diaries (where she often inscribes bibliographic information on her readings) and in her many extant extract books. Marc Schachter will track the thread of Latin commentary inscribed in these extract books, a thread that especially concerns erotic Roman poetry, which itself served Lister as an archive for sexual languages as she worked past the masculinist perspective in that poetry. Finally, Laurie Shannon will consider Lister’s biblical self-justification, in which Genesis authorizes her “oddity” as part of a divinely intended creation and also affords Lister the occasion for a queer close reading of Eve’s role in human history. Overall, these papers offer new, timely work on a massive text whose deferred time is coming at last. And in addition, Anne Lister’s diary shows that if you want to “write your own story” keen readership may be the greatest resource.

The panel will divide the time between the speakers in order to leave the full 15 minutes for discussion.