This Introduction highlights the importance of this collection - the first of its kind - for showcasing the paradigm-shifting quality of the Anne Lister archive. It describes Lister’s growing importance to a range of disciplines that include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, life writing and travel writing. It outlines how Lister’s transgression of gender and sexual boundaries not only marked and shaped every aspect of her lived experience, but also has challenged our understanding of the evolution of sexual and gendered narratives up to the present. Decoding Anne Lister includes interviews and essays on Lister’s queer sexuality and gender variance, her role as a diarist, her pushing of gender barriers through her involvement in local politics and in the managing of her Shibden Hall estate, her adventurous and at times gender-defying travels through Britain, Europe and the Russian Caucasus, and on the highly successful adaptation of the Lister diaries into the BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack. Each chapter shows how the Lister diaries have helped to reconfigure the more traditional trajectories of nineteenth-century histories of gender and sexuality, and of social and political life.

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.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.

This chapter explores the relationship between Anne Lister and her home, Shibden Hall. Initially just a locally known, ’hidden gem’ of a council-funded visitor attraction with around fifteen thousand visitors a year, it is now internationally known as ’the Home of Anne Lister’, the lesbian icon and prolific diarist, traveller, mountaineer and businesswoman. Shibden Hall is now a ’literary house’, esteemed alongside the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, for example, with which a joint conference, ’Interpreting Anne Lister and the Brontës’, was recently held. This new status could barely have been conceived of five years ago when I started as Collections Manager for Calderdale Museum Service, which manages Shibden Hall. In this chapter I will examine how Shibden Hall and its landscape defined Anne’s remarkable life and the imprint she has left on them in return, which can still be experienced today; bringing people closer to the ’real’ Anne alongside the extensive diaries and now-iconic, top-hatted ’Gentleman Jack’ character. I will also consider the challenges faced by a small museum service in delivering expectations, the difficulties in representing historic stories within a museum setting and the complexities involved in constructing the historical past.

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.