These remarkable diaries are a piece of lost lesbian history. Anne Lister defied the role of womanhood seen in the novels of Jane Austen: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller - and lesbian. She kept extensive diaries, written partly in code, of her life and loves[...]
These coded passages in Anne Lister's diary for 1817 reveal her life as a relatively educated 26-year-old who does not wish to marry. Her secretly recorded notes about money, clothes and other personal interests say much about England in the early nineteenth century.[...]
From the the multitude of papers collected and filed by Anne Lister come the diaries of herself and her lover, an Indian heiress, and all their letters to each other, some in secret code. This is the first part of their story. As far as possible their own words have been used to tell their tale, and[...]