Apart from Lister’s eventual close relationship with the Barlows (mother and daughter), she also became close with the MacKenzie mother and daughter pair (with whom she exchanged a visit after returning to London later). The two widows befriended Lister and made her part of their daily activities, visiting each other and going out shopping and sightseeing. Lister speculates on the possibility of “attaching” the 16-year-old Miss MacKenzie – an attraction that Mrs. Barlow was aware of and commented on. But the attraction was more of intellectual interest than romantic.
sexual/romantic desire
This tag is used broadly when there is discussion of erotic or romantic desire between women, whether or not specific activities are mentioned.
LHMP entry
This section opens with several encounters Lister had with figures from (recent) French history that presumably had resonance for her personally in some way. She and Mrs. Barlow visited the prison where Marie Antoinette had been kept. Orr connects this with Marie Antoinette’s homosexual reputation (true or not) and with the fascination she held in that regard in the 19th century. The two also examined the writings of Madame de Sévigné, the famous salonnière known for her intimate female friendships.
This section looks more closely at the interplay between the journal and the correspondence. The two neither duplicate content exactly nor represent entirely distinct content.
This section explores the nature and structure of the Lister’s correspondence. Although the correspondence index in the journal lists the full number of letters sent and received, and some note of their contents, the actual number of surviving letters is much smaller and selective. The nature of the content is also distinct from the journal, even apart from the restriction in which items survive. Letters carefully construct the self that Lister wished to present to the world, as well as managing her social relationships with her correspondents.
As an illustration of how topics were handled, this section opens with “this treadmill business.” As part of her general curiosity about the world, and based on a recommendation by a friend, Lister decided to view and try out the penal treadmill at Clerkenwell prison. Public reaction to this event haunted her for some time.
When focusing on the Paris era, Orr found that existing edited material was deficient. Although Whitbread’s No Priest But Love focused on a similar period, she included less than 1/6 of the journal material for that era. Green cataloged 30 letters from the era, but included only 17 of them. Liddington emphasized the importance of incorporating other documentary material–account books, etc.—for a complete understanding.
In this section, Orr challenges the accepted ideas about the meaning and uses of Lister’s “crypt hand.” Most previous editors have presented excerpts from the diaries that do not clearly distinguish material recorded in cipher from that in ordinary writing. Whitbread notes the crypt hand was used to record Lester’s “intimate” (that is, sexual) life, creating the impression that her sexual and emotional observations were always encrypted and that crypt hand was used only for this purpose.
Each of the major editions of Lister material focused on selected aspects of her social or sexual identity at specific life stages. This disjunction mirrors similar disjunctions within lesbian and feminist history. Operating in the context of queer and feminist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, Whitbread and Faderman tended to view Lister’s sexuality through a modern lens, applying sexological theories, or viewing her as transmasculine.
This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.
The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
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