Full citation:Roulston, Chris & Caroline Gonda, eds. 2023. Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archives to ‘Gentleman Jack’. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781009280723
At the time of writing, the ebook of this publication was available through Open Access at not cost at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decoding-anne-lister/E6CFCB182F71891949C4709148422131
Foreword by Emma Donoghue
This is the collection of papers based on material from the Lister archives, approached from a variety of angles. [Note: Not all of the material touches on her sexuality, but I will blog everything, though some coverage may be briefer than others.]
The front matter includes a forward by Emma Donoghue, an introduction by Chris Roulston (one of the editors), and a conversation between Carolyn Gonda (the other editor) and Helena Whitbread.
Donoghue gives a brief background to Lister and an exploration of some of the facets of her life that are fascinating to modern researchers and the general public. She notes some of the curious paradoxes of Lister’s life and personality.
Introduction by Chris Roulston
Roulston notes the sheer magnitude of Lister’s diaries, and provides a capsule history of them. There has been a tendency to see the diaries as a unique artifact. The lack of comparable material from the era creates problems of interpretation, as it is difficult to determine how representative they are. The papers in this volume explore both how the Lister archives shed light on 19th century history, and how 19th-century history created the conditions in which Lister existed.
The unique nature of the archive lies behind how Anne Lister has become both a scholarly and popular icon. Her life participates not only in how we see the past, but how we engage with commemorating and presenting that past. There is a constant conversation in this volume between past and present.
Lister challenged norms of gender and sexuality, but also was strongly rooted in conservative social and political realities. Due to the private nature of the diaries and the use of encryption to obscure certain content, Lister’s diaries offer an unrivaled glimpse into one woman’s thoughts on her own identity and sexuality, how those factors affected her life, and how she strove to manage those forces.
One key factor in the 19th century (and neighboring eras) was the separation of female and male social spaces, and the general acceptance and approval of romantic and intimate friendships between women. Within this dynamic, for a friendship to shift into eroticism could be trivial.
Although Lister is the lens through which we are given a glimpse into these queer relationships, she is scarcely the only woman whose same sex eroticism is detailed in the diaries. Her lovers (and there were many of them) and certain acquaintances participated in homoerotic relations without necessarily sharing Lister’s gender transgression. At the same time, Lister was not unique in the 19th century in combining homoeroticism with gender nonconformity. (This part of the introduction is also serving as a survey of key prior scholarship relevant to Lister studies.)
Lister's gender identity existed in a liminal space. She considered her behavior “gentlemanly” and on a few occasions fantasized about having a penis or passing as a man. But when one lover suggested that she should have been born a boy, Lister protested that being male would have excluded her from free access to “ladies’ society.”
While some of her lovers enjoyed – or at least accepted – sexual relationships with men, Lister is always adamant about rejecting the idea of heterosexual marriage and feeling only revulsion for male attention. Yet the idea of marriage was a strong attraction and Lister’s steady goal was to find a female marriage partner and go through conventional ritual and symbolic forms associated with it.
Although Lister’s gender and sexuality are a continual theme in her diaries, the material encompasses multiple other topics, reflected in the five sections of this volume. The introduction then summarizes the contents.
1. Caroline Gonda in Conversation with Helena Whitbread
This interview allows Whitbread to provide a personal history of how she encountered and worked with the Lister archives.
This article traces one aspect of how Lister understood her gender and sexuality, that is, as a “natural” variation that was to some extent unique to her. Rather than projecting modern identity concepts back in time onto Lister, Shannon locates this understanding within the past and present philosophies of Lister’s own time with respect to the concept of “nature.”
[Note: I’m going to digress for a moment on a point that Shannon doesn’t address in particular. Discourse around homosexuality in classical philosophy up through the Renaissance included a theme that it was “against nature” (contra naturem), not so much in the sense of flouting the dictates of a personified Nature – although there was an aspect of that – but in the sense that it was considered part of the inherent nature of all creatures to desire at the opposite sex, and that behavior in contradiction to this went against what was expected to be people’s inherent “nature.” This is relevant to Shannon’s argument, because Lister is introducing a more multivalent concept of the range of inherent natures possible for human beings. That there is no single universal “nature” with regard to gender/sexuality, and thus people can diverge from the normative state without going against their individual “nature.” It’s very much a “born this way” argument but – as we’ll see – does not embrace homosexuality as a “type of person” collectively, but more along the lines of the “individual taste” concept that pops up regularly from classical times onward.]
When Lister writes about how she does and does not fit into society’s expectations along a number of axes, she continually returns to two themes: claiming the identity of “oddity” and asserting that this is her “nature,” connecting the concept with writings about natural history. This contrasts significantly with modern historians’ characterizations of her identity as transgression or non-conformity
The standard approach to natural history – entwined thoroughly with both classical writings and Christian philosophy – saw the world in terms of “creation” and a “creator.” The state of existence was a deliberate and conscious creation of an omnipotent deity, and the characteristics of creatures (= “create”-ures) were neither random nor accidental. [Note: As noted previously, within this understanding, behaviors that were considered “against nature” were thus considered a deliberate rejection of God’s intent, making them a moral failing.]
In developing an understanding of her own “nature,” Lister looked to texts that enumerated and celebrated the diversity of creation and the assignment of different “natures” to different creatures -- “each according to their kind.” Where Lister diverged from more traditional thought was in envisioning the existence of fractally individual “natures” to which one must be true. A person might be “odd” with respect to expectations while still acting according to their own nature.
Lister frequently describes herself -- in her journals or to others – as “odd” or having “my oddity” in the context not only of her sexual desires, but her clothing preferences and behavioral habits. But her oddity, from her point of view, was not a shared characteristic with other women who loved women, but a feature unique to herself. This puts a slightly different spin on Lister’s refusal to identify with terms she encountered in classical literature, such as tribade or fricatrix, or with “sapphist” which she explicitly rejects as an identity. After discussing their shared desire for women with Miss Pickford (an intellectual neighbor in a romantic partnership with another woman) Lister protests in her journal, “she supposed to meet like herself – how she is mistaken.” It seems to have been important to Lister to view herself as unique and special. She quotes one of her literary heroes, Rousseau, in her journal: “I am not made like any of those I’ve seen; I dare to believe not made like any of those who exist.”
Despite Lister’s fixation on uniqueness, “oddity” along with “singular” and “unaccountable” was a regular codeword associated with lesbianism or gender nonconformity in the 18th and 19th centuries (per Caroline Gonda).
The article now shifts to considering how Lister’s “oddity” is depicted in modern media and deployed symbolically by her modern fandom. The next section of the article explores other examples from the 17th to 19th centuries of interpreting “nature” broad-mindedly, or of discussions of divine creation that could be used to support such an interpretation.
Lister’s concept of her “oddity” encompassed more than sexuality. She describes how others responded to “my figure, manner of walking and my voice” commenting that people might notice such things but found them “agreeable.” [Note: We can’t entirely trust Lister’s perceptions here, but at least people told her to her face that they liked her “oddity.”]
Lister’s embracing of her own homosexuality as natural and positive did not extend to all possible flavors of queerness (by modern definition). She disapproves of being “connected to both sexes” (i.e., bisexuality), approving only of a consistent and exclusive desire for a particular sex. She approves only of same-sex desire that is experienced spontaneously and not “done from books.” [Note: I’m trying to envision what she means here, but it might be a reference to pornography.] She distains sex acts that involve anything not “natural.” Her disparagement of “saffic regard” is due to defining this as involving the use of a dildo. Her love is natural and constant; anything involving artifice or inconstancy falls outside her definition of “nature.” Nature might have “been in an odd freak” when creating Lister, but her desires were entirely due to that natural creation, and therefore were beyond judgment. She further notes – when researching anatomical theories of sexuality – that with respect to her own nature, “no exterior formation accounted for it, it was all the effects of the mind.” That is, for herself, she discards the popular idea of an anatomical cause for lesbian desire.