Today part of the @MuseumBuddy collab with @ShibdenHall & @BankfieldMuseum as we explore LGBTQ connections together - I want to explore how the diaries of our 19th c lesbian extraordinaire of Shibden, Anne Lister, were ultimately discovered, decoded and saved - not once but twice
This story has everything: hidden shelves in a medieval mansion, (almost) fire, taking a stand against the destruction and censorship of LGBTQ heritage, cracking codes and detailed lesbian sex scenes. What's not to love?
The fact that we know about Anne Lister's life - and her relationships with women - is down to her incredible documentation of her life in diaries, started when she was 15...spanning 26 volumes! (I tried to keep a diary at 14 and failed after 2 days so admire Anne for this alone)
Sent to a boarding school as a child and secluded in its attic in her teens due to her rebellious behaviour, writing a diary would have been a source of escape, starting as loose scraps of paper. She also started documenting her relationship with Eliza Raine, her attic roommate
Her everyday life accounts were written in English but Anne started devising a code to protect the details of her sexuality and lesbian sexual experiences using Latin, Greek, punctuation and maths! This has started off with simply using "felix" (happy in Latin) to describe sex.
Over the years, Anne would use a lot of different codes to express sex and orgasms. Writer and researcher @HelenaWhitbread to which we owe the decryption and transcription of Anne's diaries recorded several codes, like a Q with a curl or the word “kiss” being codes for sex. 
Demonstrated by phrases like this...“I took off my pelisse and drawers, got into bed and had a very good kiss." And an X in the margins of Anne's diaries? Well, that indicated an orgasm! It may be strange to fixate on lesbian sex, but it's kind of important for several reasons...
First off, this was plainly and simply Anne's approach. Her obsessive, "no details left out" documentation of her life and her passionate courting of other women is directly linked to her sexuality and her way of exploring, owning and expressing it.
And relatedly - such revelations continue to shatter long-held assumptions around lesbian love. Back in the 19th century (to sum up very briefly!), women's love would have been seen as a platonic, non-sexual affair. Their erasure stemmed from sexist concepts arond sex and desire.
Here is author Sarah Waters discussing this matter and as it relates to Anne Lister's diaries for @HistoricEngland 's Pride of Place project
Which is why, do this day, we need to watch out for assumptions and erasure being made around historical women's love being depicted as "strong friendships". Would Ann Walker have been remembered as Anne's BFF rather than her lover and then wife were it not for the journals?
As a lesbian researcher, I can tell you it's impossible to explore anything relating to depictions of lesbian sexuality without first coming across media which has men objectifying women loving women for their own entertainment, from 18th c paintings to (even mainstream) films/TV
So we're in a strange situation where we still need to seek out lesbians expressing their sexuality for other queer women and for themselves and Anne's diaries - as historical documents and as a literary work - are a testament to this
Before Ann Walker, Anne would have many lovers (I talked about them yesterday in this thread here: But as we fast-forward to her death, she would have left one more important written witness to her relationship with Anne - her will...
She bequeathes Shibden to her ‘friend’ Ann Walker but if Ann married she would be disinherited". Ann did so as well in her will (both kept at the @UkNatArchives ). Anne dies in Russia where they were travelling together and Ann returns her body and final volumes of her diary home
*Ann...! (This was bound to happen at some point!)
Ann's ownership does not last long - removed from Shibden by relatives and committed to an asylum (details of her mental health and/or grief are unclear, shrouded by ableist language of the time: many women ended their lives in such places where they did not receive any support)
(It's important to recognise that there are many historical precedents of women being isolated for failing to conform to societal expectations...but it's equally possible Ann Walker was struggling with mental health and never got the help she needed in dealing with Anne's death)
Anne died in 1840 (poor Ann spent 8 months bringing her coffin back home by the way...). Fast forward to the 1890s where John Lister is at Shibden trying to decipher the coded parts of her diary he has uncovered and will soon be in for a bit of a late 19th century surprise
(Time for an iced coffee break - leave me your Qs/comments/thoughts in the meantime as we get into the fun bits of the decoding and (re)discovery!)
And we're back! Where were we? Yes, John Lister about to discover a bit more about his ancestor - with the help of his friend Arthur Burrell. Discovering a sentence starting with “In God is my…” and ending with a 4-letter coded word helps them crack the code. The word? Hope.
And it was a hopeful moment for Anne's legacy and LGBTQ heritage but one that almost ended in disaster as the two men started deciphering the coded parts of the diary and coming across the full detail of Anne's lesbian encounters.
Funnily enough, in spite of his shock, John Lister did publish some excerpts of Anne's diaries in the local newspapers relating to local history and leaving out the juicy bits. But Arthur's opinion was that John should burn the diaries, to avoid any discovery of Anne's sexuality.
John refused. Why? One theory is John could not bring himself to destroy his ancestor's life work. Another is that John Lister was gay and would have been in the closet, unable to express his own queerness in plain sight, but unable to commit a queer relative's legacy to flames.
The revelation John was gay might have us ask - wasn't this all the more reason to make the full content of Anne's diaries public? Sadly, John's relationship with his queerness and Anne's would have been complex and fraught with the same fear Anne had of being exposed and ruined
He could have feared drawing attention to his own sexuality by visibly supporting and championing Anne Lister's lesbian identity. But there's hope in this sadness: John still saved her legacy, maybe in his own hope that future generations of queer people may openly read her works
Coincidentally Anne DID burn evidence herself... ‘Burnt Mr Montagu’s farewell verses that no trace of any man’s admiration may remain. It is not meet for me. I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.’
So what do we love more than secret lesbian history escaping the bonfire? Secret lesbian history being hidden behind wood panelling of an ancestral historic house of course! Until his death in 1933, the documents remained stashed away at Shibden...
We maybe have John to thank once more for the current situation regarding the journals because due to his poor management of the estate Shibden and its contents passed under public ownership to Halifax Council - and the diaries found and gifted to Halifax Library...
...where Anne piques the interest of librarian Muriel Green who researches Anne's letters in the 30s. Arthur, now in London and in his 80s, ends up giving the copy he kept of the code key to the Halifax Corporation (would become Calderdale Council in 1974)
An interesting discovery I made this week - in 1967, researcher Vivien Ingham was exploring Anne Lister's life and her mountaineering in the Pyrenees. She has been able to decode many elements of the diaries relating to Anne's life, including this iconic passage...
"I love and only love the fairer sex, and thus beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.”
Sadly Ingham died suddenly in 1969, unable to make this lesbian identity revealed in the diaries explicit and her fellow student Phylis Ramsden who took over her research made no effort to uncover it - on the contrary censoring it (according to Ingham's supervisor Olive Anderson)
A good reminder that historians can be rewarded for uncovering queer history just as they can be responsible for erasing it - making it so hard to uncover evidence of many queer historical relationships due to homophobic and transphobic bias in research and heritage...to this day
Museums and archives must recognise their responsability in hiding queer histories in plain sight within their collections, either by limiting access or by censoring its contents. It's not too late to make yourself accountable to finally make ALL of these stories visible at last.
Which leads us to a happy conclusion - @HelenaWhitbread 's discovery of the diaries, seeking out a research project. Her 1983 discovery of the diaries and their code led to an incredible initiative to decipher and transcribe Anne's legacy to make her lesbian identity visible
I cannot recommend enough this brilliant website in which Helena Whitbread talks about Anne, the diaries, her research, decryption and editing, honouring Anne's life and sexuality unflichingly, leading to a first publication in 1988, I Know My Own Heart
annelister.co.uk/about-helena-w…
annelister.co.uk/about-helena-w…
You can also hear Helena talking about her research during the unveiling of a new plaque at Holy Trinity Church in York in 2019 (changed to explicitely include Anne described as a lesbian diarist).
Shoutout to the @TheCCT and @thehistoryb0y ! Later on this week we'll look at the church and @ShibdenHall itself as sites of queer importance and pilgrimage in their own right as well as Anne and Ann's marriage there...
Helena's publications (the first followed by No Priest But Love, covering Anne's life 1824-1826, then The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister covering her life 1816-1824.) and decryption/editing work have launched a huge amount of lesbian historical research around Anne Lister
Research amongst many others by Helena, Jill Liddington, @AnneChoma and Angela Clare, Collections Officer at Calderdale Museums, is supplemented by countless other scholars studying her work - and @AnneListerSoc has been set up to continue this sharing of knowledge
Often there's so much exciting research going on you can't find everyone at once...please add to this list (I'll update) Description I love: @EDonoghueWriter describing Lister diaries as the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history sparking new research into lesbian 19th century life
What's really important to remember, mentions for instance historian Dr Caroline Gonda, of Cambridge University is this: “People say she was a one-off but there’s a community there (...) She’s not the only gay in the village." Anne accounts for many other lesbians around her...
...as well as those whose records and experiences have been lost by censorship both during their lifetime and after their death. Some may have been burnt. Some still hidden. Fear during their lifetime may have led to self-censorship.
We can express frustration at the queer archives we have lost but retain hope that we ourselves can "crack" the code for many more legacies waiting to be discovered. And for those we cannot - we have to remember to resist assumptions and uphold queer readings and interpretations
A final note - this made me think of a very emotional visit of the @BishopsgateInst archives, where the diaries of people on the LGBTQ spectrum have been entrusted to the archives, as a gesture of trust that their legacies will be kept safe for future readers...
This concludes my little thread on cracking the Anne Lister diary code! There was just too much to explore! Now I want to hear from you! If you had to entrust a piece of queer livelihood to an archive what would it be? What would you save from the fire or hide under a floorboard?
@threadreaderapp unroll please
