Portrait
Anne Lister
Born
3 April 1791Halifax, Yorkshire, England
Died
22 September 1840Kutaisi, Georgia · aged 49
Diarist, landowner and travellerUnited Kingdom235th birthday

Anne Lister

Her coded diaries preserve an unusually detailed account of love between women in nineteenth-century England.

Anne Lister was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1791. She took over the running of her family’s Shibden Hall estate in 1826 and later inherited it. Managing tenants, land and coal interests, she pursued a degree of independence unusual for a woman of her time.

Her diaries eventually filled around five million words. Roughly a sixth was written in a code combining Greek letters and mathematical symbols, allowing her to describe relationships and sex with women in detail alongside her business affairs and travels.

In 1834 Lister and Ann Walker took communion together at Holy Trinity Church in York. They understood the occasion as a commitment to one another, though it had no legal standing as a marriage. Walker moved into Shibden Hall, and the two travelled together. Lister’s journeys included an ascent of the Vignemale in the Pyrenees in 1838.

She died of a fever while travelling in the Caucasus in 1840. John Lister and Arthur Burrell deciphered the diary code in the 1890s, but its sexual content remained largely concealed for decades. The diaries later received UNESCO recognition, and the television drama “Gentleman Jack” brought her story to a much wider audience in 2019.

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