Anne Lister - The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

Helena Whitbread was born in 1931 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, into an Irish-Catholic family. Due to ill-health, her grammar-school education was cut short at the age of fourteen. After a series of unskilled jobs, she married and had four children. Always conscious of her unfinished education, in her thirties she began a programme of self-education via the local College of Further Education, which qualified her to enter the Civil Service. In 1975 she enrolled in the Open University and in 1976 went to Bradford University to study full-time. After gaining a Joint Honours degree in Politics, Literature and the History of Ideas, she went on to study for a Postgraduate Certificate of Education. Once qualified, she was employed as a teacher by Calderdale Education Department and also began to work on the Anne Lister journals. The two books of edited extracts which resulted from her work are published in Britain and America. Now retired, Helena is working on a biography of Anne Lister.

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-12571-5

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright Helena Whitbread 1988, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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I know my own heart & I know men. I am not made like any other I have seen. I dare believe myself to be different from any others who exist.

Rousseau, Confessions, Volume I

I might exclaim with Virgil, In tenui labor, but I am resolved not to let my life pass without some private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freshly now.

Anne Lister, Friday, 19 February 1819

It is to Dr Betteridge and his excellent team of archivists that my first debt of gratitude must be paid. They have given unstintingly of their time, expertise, good humour and friendly advice throughout the period I was engaged in actively researching this book. My grateful thanks to them and also to the staff of the Reference Library, next to the archive department, whose help was as willingly forthcoming when the archives were closed.

To my many friends and colleagues in secondary education in Calderdale whom I have met whilst working as a supply teacher, I can only say thank you for your interest in the Anne Lister saga. Support and encouragement has come from many quarters, not least from language teachers when I was struggling with some rather puzzling quotations in French, Latin and Greek which occur in Annes scholarly journals. My own deficiencies in those areas have been nicely camouflaged, thanks to their help.

To Ruthie Petrie and Rosalind Smith I extend my thanks and appreciation. As my editors and advisers at Virago Press they have guided me and helped to shape the book into a manageable publication.

A special thank you to Caroline Davidson whose own work on The World of Mary Ellen Best brought about our friendship. Her constructive advice, her scholarly interest in my work, and her professional expertise in, and knowledge of, the publishing world have been immensely beneficial to me.

My immediate family, of course, have been intimately involved in the whole proceedings from the start. To Rachel and her friend, Ruthanne Gregory, I give my thanks and love for their patient research undertaken in York on my behalf. To my son, Philip, for his work in Calderdale archives at times when I was unable to go myself and for his continuing interest and support in my literary activities, many thanks are due and my very best hopes and wishes for his own literary work. To my two other daughters, Claire and Elizabeth, go my thanks for their patience and tolerance. Immersed as they are in busy family and business lives, with all the attendant problems such lives bring, they have nevertheless been a willing and sympathetic audience when I have expounded on my literary problems, of which there have been not a few. Lastly, a very special thank you to my husband, Bob, whose role in the whole undertaking has been of crucial importance in enabling me to work as freely as I have done. Role-reversal situations are no longer a novelty in these times of mass unemployment and the professionalization of women, but degrees of willingness and efficiency must vary. I can only say that the smooth running of the domestic scene has, for the last few years, been entirely due to his efforts and has been the most important factor of all in enabling me to embark, somewhat belatedly, on my writing career, the first fruits of which lie in the present publication.

My thanks go to my editor at Virago, Donna Coonan, and my agent, Caroline Davidson, for their help and guidance in the preparation of this new edition. It remains for me to say that throughout the whole undertaking, historical and textual accuracy have been an over-riding concern; I have placed it equally in importance with my desire to elucidate the life of a courageous and extraordinary woman.

To my daughter, Rachel, whose

love, care and support throughout

the Anne Lister years has been,

and continues to be, invaluable.

In their entirety, the journals of Anne Lister run to four million words. They are contained in two thin blue exercise books and twenty-four small hardback volumes. The journals evolve over a number of years: although they begin in 1806, it isnt until 1808 that the entries become more detailed and Anne introduces the rudiments of what is eventually to become an elaborate code her crypthand as she called it the use of which allowed her the freedom to describe her intimate life in great detail.

The idea of using an esoteric code appears to have had its roots in Annes burgeoning knowledge of the Greek language: she mingles Greek letters with other symbols of her own devising. She felt safe in the belief that no one would be able to decipher the coded passages, and as her confidence grew, they became longer and much more explicit when dealing with those aspects of her life which could not be written about in plainhand.

The history of the concealment of the journals is a story in itself. Whether or not Anne Lister intended to destroy them before her death is a debatable point. In 1840, her premature death in Russia, at the age of forty-nine, precluded any such decision on her part. Her journals remained intact at Shibden Hall for a period of almost sixty years until, in 1887, John Lister, the last remaining member of the Lister family to occupy Shibden Hall, decided to publish some of the plainhand extracts in the local paper under the title Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago. The crypthand passages had not yet been deciphered and their content was still unknown.

However, the secrets buried within Annes cryptic code were about to be discovered. John Lister and his friend, Arthur Burrell, a Bradford schoolteacher and antiquarian, decided to set themselves the task of attempting to unravel the code. What they found was, to them, so disturbing that Burrell thought they ought to burn the journals immediately. What was it that so shocked these two educated Victorian gentlemen? Arthur Burrell put it into words some years later when he wrote that: The contents of this cipher is an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many friends; hardly any one of them escaped her.