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3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
2.5
Anne Lister may be "history's first modern lesbian" but she is also an absolutely terrible person.
Anne Lister may be "history's first modern lesbian" but she is also an absolutely terrible person.
What a splendid read, though I will never forgive Phyllis Ramsden for neglecting to even paraphrase large sections of Anne Lister's encrypted journal entries, and for declaring them "of no historical interest whatever" and "excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind".
challenging
emotional
informative
slow-paced
This book made me think a lot of things, she was a great traveller, a mountaineer, a business woman, a landlady. But also massively against unions, gaslighty with her partner's and in the epilogues words, the only person Anne Lister loved was herself.
Anne Lister sounds like a dreadful person. Only caring about herself, wasting everyone's money, treating her lovers like dirt AND supporting the Tories and child labour.
If you're reading this because you've seen the recent BBC TV show, you'll be in for a disappointing shock. Anne Lister is certainly more complex, maddening and downright unlikeable in this account than when written by Sally Wainwright. However, as fascinating Anne Lister and her life were as a pretty much out lesbian in Georgian England, the extremely linear style of this book renders this tale somewhat dull in places.
I read an article about Anne Lister some months ago, and found it very interesting: the bare facts of her life are fascinating. An independent woman, Lister travelled extensively, and managed to take control of her uncle's estates due to her determination and strong business acumen. She was also a lesbian, and had many different female partners over her life, and lived openly with a woman, considering herself to be married. She wrote obsessively in her diary, using a secret code in a mixture of English and Ancient Greek to recount her relationships with women. However, the details of Lister's life are not as fascinating as the broad strokes. Her diary, while an important document about queer life in regency England, is not particularly interesting, and her relationships are full of arguments and impetuous decisions that are not compelling to read. A Tory, she spends a lot of time frittering away money and treating her tenants harshly. Undeniably, Lister is an interesting figure in queer history, but I think an article does her justice: she doesn't need a whole biography.
Super interesting topic/person in theory but the writing really wasn't it
I wish I didn't have to read so many minor details and had more scientific work done than just retellings of her journals
I wish I didn't have to read so many minor details and had more scientific work done than just retellings of her journals
informative
medium-paced
Very thorough biography. There are two biographies of Anne Lister which have recently been released, no doubt in giddiness for the coming BBC/HBO series on Anne Lister's life. I was in Halifax earlier this year and visited Shibdon Hall, which has spurred me on to do some more reading on this curious woman's life. I find her fasincating as she was an oddball, very big on diary writing, from Yorkshire (woo!) and loved travel and discovering things, places, learning etc etc... Not to say that she was perfect. In some ways it's said that she was ahead of her time, being an independent woman, a lesbian, living with a woman... and yet she was very old school traditional. Although she couldn't vote, what with being a woman, she made sure she took on tenants who thought in the same lines politically; she employed children in her industries (yes, child of the time etc, but it's always disappointing when people look at lower classes as non-people, and can only see injustices when they affect themselves), and there was an incidence of a village complaining about the water coming off Ann Walker's land, so Anne Lister got her to put a barrell of tar in the water source so as to ruin the water for those villagers, to teach them their place. She was also a randy lady, with a few girlfriends on the go. She liked them pretty and a bit dim, for want of a better expression, yet complained at times that they weren't enough for her. Yet when she met a woman who was her equal, she completely shyed away from her. I'm not sure if she liked to feel superior to her partners, or if it wasn't also that in some of the abuse she got for her odd ways, made her embrace her oddness, which in turn defined her. Meeting someone so similiar may have devalued her uniqueness somehow.
The travelling is also very impressed. She and Ann Walker travelled all over Russia, and some nights they were really roughing it. They explored all over. Not quite the quiet retiring English rose ladies that the society of the time expected, but I love this bit of gumption. And it seems Ann Walker blossomed with it - perhaps being a patronised and well-behaved lady in Victorian England with less scope to "live" was what brought on the depression.
It may seem as though women were free and all running around doing what they liked when you consider a lot of what happens in Anne's life, but these are still very repressive times for women. The lesbianism happened because I don't think it was taken seriously as a real thing, and therefore nothing to be concerned over. But then if relatives needed to get an awkward woman out of the way (and her very existance might have been awkward when it came to inheritances, taking control of the family money) they were just locked up in the asylum in York - even though they weren't "mad". People really show how awful humankind can be when someone dies.
There's a couple of random pages in the biography about the Brontes. They and Anne Lister never met, but the book says Anne Bronte in particular probably knew of Anne Lister and all the stories about her. I can go with that. It then gives a bit of a thin theory that Wuthering Heights is based on Anne and Ann's relationship - because they were arguing and it included the seperate family assests (I bet they were the first couple to ever argue! sarcasm.) and because of the homes in Ann's life was called Lightcliffe... and there's a cliff in Heathcliff's name. Sorry, I need a lot more convincing than that.
A random curiosity for me is that this was written by a German writer, and this book is the English translation. There are a lot of quotes from Anne's diaries. Which would have been translated into German for the original book. I just hope in translating to English, they used Anne's original words rather than translating back to English. Going back and forth, something can always be lost in translation.
Anyway, I plan to read the other book, and also the diary excerpts, so we'll see what I make of those.
The travelling is also very impressed. She and Ann Walker travelled all over Russia, and some nights they were really roughing it. They explored all over. Not quite the quiet retiring English rose ladies that the society of the time expected, but I love this bit of gumption. And it seems Ann Walker blossomed with it - perhaps being a patronised and well-behaved lady in Victorian England with less scope to "live" was what brought on the depression.
It may seem as though women were free and all running around doing what they liked when you consider a lot of what happens in Anne's life, but these are still very repressive times for women. The lesbianism happened because I don't think it was taken seriously as a real thing, and therefore nothing to be concerned over. But then if relatives needed to get an awkward woman out of the way (and her very existance might have been awkward when it came to inheritances, taking control of the family money) they were just locked up in the asylum in York - even though they weren't "mad". People really show how awful humankind can be when someone dies.
There's a couple of random pages in the biography about the Brontes. They and Anne Lister never met, but the book says Anne Bronte in particular probably knew of Anne Lister and all the stories about her. I can go with that. It then gives a bit of a thin theory that Wuthering Heights is based on Anne and Ann's relationship - because they were arguing and it included the seperate family assests (I bet they were the first couple to ever argue! sarcasm.) and because of the homes in Ann's life was called Lightcliffe... and there's a cliff in Heathcliff's name. Sorry, I need a lot more convincing than that.
A random curiosity for me is that this was written by a German writer, and this book is the English translation. There are a lot of quotes from Anne's diaries. Which would have been translated into German for the original book. I just hope in translating to English, they used Anne's original words rather than translating back to English. Going back and forth, something can always be lost in translation.
Anyway, I plan to read the other book, and also the diary excerpts, so we'll see what I make of those.