In July 2018, the York Civic Trust unveiled the first rainbow plaque in the UK, commemorating Anne Lister’s union with Ann Walker. The plaque, at the church in York where the two women celebrated their bond by taking communion together, sparked controversy with its labelling of Lister as ‘gender-nonconforming entrepreneur’. Following a consultation period, a new plaque describing Lister as ‘lesbian and diarist’ was unveiled in February 2019. On 3 April 2019 (Lister’s birthday), a third plaque was presented at Shibden Hall, the house and estate she inherited from her uncle. Avoiding the controversy of the first York plaque, it described Lister as ‘diarist, businesswoman, landowner, traveller and lesbian who recorded much of her personal life in a secret code’. Lister herself repeatedly insists on the naturalness of her desire for women, as well as on her own exceptionalism. Yet her diaries also show her looking for women like her, not as sexual partners but as models (the Ladies of Llangollen) or as kindred spirits (the masculine bluestocking Miss Pickford). This chapter explores the implications and the stakes of attempts to classify and categorise Anne Lister according to past and present rubrics of gender and sexuality.

As an archive, the Anne Lister diaries are an extraordinary tale of survival, in that the diaries came close to being destroyed and their coded content was kept hidden until Helena Whitbread, an independent scholar from Halifax, published the first coded extracts with Virago Press in 1988. Gonda’s interview follows Whitbread’s journey of discovery into the coded sections of the diaries and the laborious process of decrypting the diaries by hand, before computers had become generally available. As Whitbread delved deeper into the Lister archive, her sense of its importance increased exponentially and she began to understand the need to have coded extracts from the diaries published as a book available to the public. Whitbread then published a second volume of extracts in 1992 and she discusses what made her decide to focus on Lister’s intimate relationships in the vast five-million-word archive available to her. Currently working on an Anne Lister biography, Whitbread shares her own affective relationship with the Lister diaries over the years and responds to the unprecedented fame Lister has achieved in part as a result of the Gentleman Jack series. This has included key transformations in Whitbread’s own public life as one of the founders of Lister scholarship.

BAFTA-winning British television writer/director/producer Sally Wainwright is known for her commitment to telling women’s stories as well as to her home county of Yorkshire. She used to visit Anne Lister’s Shibden Hall as a child, and her twenty years of effort to bring a drama about Lister to the small screen - after being repeatedly turned down by those who saw it as unfilmable or niche - has finally paid off with the runaway success of the BBC/HBO’s Gentleman Jack, set in 1832 when Lister began courting Ann Walker. The two-season TV series is notable not just for how it draws on the whole corpus of the past four decades of Lister research - thoughtfully balancing accuracy against the requirements of family-friendly, prestige primetime drama - but for the way it has in turn nourished a new wave of scholarship. When Wainwright won the 2016 Wellcome Screenwriting Fellowship which is intended to buy a writer time and space to work, she generously funded the scanning and online publication of all 7,720 pages of Lister’s diaries by West Yorkshire Archive Service and Calderdale Museums, which has enabled the ongoing, crowdsourced transcription of this extraordinary corpus.

Any historical account of lesbian feminist criticism must, sooner or later, grapple with a myth of origins. The myth itself is not always the same, but certain features remain constant. I could begin by invoking Laura Doan's keynote address to the international Lesbian Lives conference in Dublin in 2004, a conference marking ten years of lesbian lives, studies and activism since the publication of Doan's critical anthology, The Lesbian Postmodern. In her conference speech, Doan emphasised the need to create a new genealogical model of lesbian studies and to dislodge what she called ‘this now calcified origin narrative’: the narrative of lesbian feminism's collision with, and defeat by, queer theory (Doan, 2004). Other participants at the conference – Linda Garber and Paulina Palmer, for example – likewise voiced their dissent from this dominant narrative, pointing out the unacknowledged connections between lesbian feminist thought and queer theory, and the injustice of the narrative's stereotypes: queer theory as ‘sexy, vital, pluralistic and fun’, lesbian feminism as the opposite (Palmer, 2004).

Ten years earlier, a different yet strikingly similar myth of origins was dominating lesbian and gay studies, as Kathleen Martindale noted: the story of ‘how the American feminist sex wars over sexual representation in the early 1980s created lesbian category trouble, broke up the feminist consensus, realigned lesbians with gay men and then brought forth the newest kid on the block: lesbian postmodernism’ (Martindale, 1997: 1).