Now here are the diaries of a 18th century lesbian. I don’t know what I thought was going on back then, but DAMN. Charmingly, they were discovered by a PhD student who was looking for a subject in her home town of Halifax, so she would not need to travel too much. She was reading the letters of Anne Lister, and then (as she put it) the librarian changed the next decade of her life with seven words: “Did you know she had a diary?”
The diary, which in total runs to five million words, was half in a code that Lister invented. The family had the key to the code, but had suppressed it these two hundred years, because what that coded stuff was about was super gay. It is charming, and it is also sad.
The charming part is how she keeps falling in love with everyone. Here she is when a woman responds to her complimenting her bonnet:
“She seemed pleased, saying she thought I did not notice such things as these. I said no, not in general. Some people might have sacks about their heads & I not know, but there were some whose ribands I could count over the last seven years.”
She is also constantly swearing off love. Just like people centuries later, she keeps being “determined to devote myself soley to study,” and then not three days later falling in love again. The sad part is that she is actually in a long distance committed relationship with a woman called Mariana. It’s long distance, because at the time of the diaries, Mariana has gotten married (for the money) but this does not stop the women from considering themselves a couple. To give you a sense of all what goes on, let me just say Mariana gives Anne an STD (called ‘the whites’) which Anne then gives to her hookup Isabella (who btw is a bottle-of-wine-a-day drinker). There’s a lot of ‘treating’ herself by injecting herself with pepper.
One also learns a lot about the eighteenth century, not least how horrible the food is. Try this sample: “My aunt’s bowels being far from well, & myself very bilious, we had minced veal (white) & a light batter pudding with a lump of preserved apricot on top”
Probably what I most liked about the book is the intimacy. She really tells you her truth. As she puts it: “What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on my book & feel relieved”
There are lots of moments when you feel her touching you across time. Like this one: “They are clearing my room that I am sitting alone in the drawing-room . . . I feel rather low. I must turn my mind into another train of thought.”
She had ambition to be a writer, but unfortunately died of a fever while on holiday in Russia at 50. Strange to think she has achieved a certain kind of fame anyway. I’ll try and stop now, because this woman’s life was very interesting. I recommend you wikipedia her, I haven’t even got into her first love who was a mixed race girl who ended up in an insane asylum, or the scraping her teeth with a pen knife for a half hour at at time, or the non-binaryness, or the electrifying machine experimentation –