Against the longstanding force of charges that certain sexualities are ‘unnatural’, Anne Lister grounds her astonishing confidence squarely in an argument about nature. For her, nature serves as a rationale rather than a general prohibition or quasi-juridical bar against a sexual expression she had reason to consider fairly unique. Indeed, Lister’s interpretation of nature provided not only a lens, or even a kind of permission, but a profound authorisation of who or what she saw herself to be, of what she called ‘my ways’. Rather than seeing herself as turning away from nature or somehow violating its laws, she was doing the opposite: she was following natural prescriptions. ’Odd’, surely, and ’queer’ in the broadest sense - but not ‘deviant’. How, then, did Lister understand nature, itself one of the richest concepts in the history of ideas? What intellectual, scientific and theological resources made this reading of nature available to her, and what innovations did she add to the repertoire? The chapter elucidates Lister’s brilliant synthesis of theology, Latin poetry and natural history to naturalise her ‘ways’ - indeed, to the point where she could assert ‘When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and, from that moment, become inconsistent with ourselves’ as a queer motto for erotic persuasion.