Anne Choma - Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister

Anne Lister is unique and fascinating. She is known primarily as a diarist, and as a great lesbian lover who recorded her adventures with other women in a secret code, but there are a myriad other things to know about this extraordinary woman, who never fails to ignite the imagination.

Anne was unusually intelligent and remarkably physically fit. She had an enviable passion for life. What she didnt cram into her tragically short forty-nine years probably wasnt worth doing. And not only did she live a remarkable life, she recorded it in obsessive detail, every day, from her late teens to the last month before her death, from getting up, to going to bed. It is the diary of a perfectionist with an eye for detail; of a woman with a brilliant mind who was fascinated by the world and everything in it. In the coded parts it is often the stream of consciousness outpourings of a passionate human being who had more mental and physical energy than she knew what to do with.

Anne read as profusely as she wrote, keeping herself well informed in the latest thinking in a bewildering array of subjects. She was a true polymath; someone who could absorb complex information, process it quickly and use it effectively. She was a player, both in her professional life running her estate, and in her private life as a lover of women. Her mental and physical prowess and her love of life are inspiring, but there is another side to Anne Lister. She was an authoritarian landowner who believed firmly in a hierarchical social order. Her estate was modest in size (she was never well off), but it was rich in coal, and she owned mines in which people were employed to work cruelly long hours, enduring inhumane and humiliating conditions. As Suranne astutely observed when we started rehearsing Gentleman Jack, Shes a bit Marmite, this one. One of the many contradictions about Anne Lister is that she appears so far ahead of her time in having such an admirably healthy attitude towards her homosexuality, whilst being something of a dinosaur (even in her own time) in regarding those from the deprived classes as insensate commodities.

Anne Lister was a survivor in a world that could easily have had no place for her, a world that would have rendered her invisible if shed had less about her. She was smart enough and confident enough to construct a self-identity that would allow her to live her life just as boldly, ambitiously and freely as she chose. She refused to be ignored or made invisible simply because she was born with a penchant for members of her own sex. As well as her robust physical health, its clear (between the lines of the journal) that she enjoyed robust mental health too, and it was perhaps this psychological strength that allowed her, when it was convenient, to turn a blind eye to the hardship of others. Of course these contradictions and complexities are the things that make Anne Lister a gift to a dramatist. As Eliza Priestley points out in the first episode of Gentleman Jack, whether we like Anne Lister or not, Shes very entertaining.

Thanks to Arthur McReas generous legacy to the people of Halifax after John Listers death in 1933, Shibden Hall has been part of my life ever since I can remember. As a child I came here all the time with my dad, Harry Wainwright, a keen amateur historian. He taught me how to row on the lake, and now and again we went up to the hall and the folk museum. I loved Shibden then, and I love it still. Something about it entered my soul. That it was once owned by the remarkable Anne Lister, odd as it seems to me now, is an entire coincidence. In the early seventies no one mentioned Anne Lister. I cant remember how I became aware of her, but as a teenager I started to pick up on the fact that an extraordinary woman had once owned Shibden, but there was something about her that people didnt like to discuss. Times have changed and we now live in a world where we can celebrate a woman who almost two hundred years ago chose to marry another woman. We should also celebrate Annes partner, Ann Walker, a shy woman who had the courage to make a conspicuous commitment to the woman she was so dazzled by.

I met Anne Choma fifteen years ago (through an initiative to try and transcribe the Anne Lister diaries) and we became friends. When Gentleman Jack was green lit by the BBC and HBO I invited her on board as my adviser and she has been a wonderful collaborator. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her, not just for her work, but for her support too. Weve climbed our own little Vignemale together, and got down the other side, and there were a couple of times when I didnt think Id make it, but she kept me going. The diaries are vast and complicated. To transcribe, absorb, and then dramatise the eighteen months we have covered in season one has been a mammoth task that perhaps only those familiar with the diaries will appreciate. One of the hardest tasks during that process was making choices about what