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3.89 AVERAGE
3.89 AVERAGE
A companion piece to the HBO show about Anne Lister, the first person known to have married someone of the same sex, in 1833 in England. using copious entries from her diary, it tells a tale of a well traveled woman, strong and secure in who she was. With some sex in it as well.
A really accessible way to learn about part of Anne Lister's life and learn a bit of background to the series. Really engaging and fascinating book.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
'When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and from that moment we become inconsistent with ourselves.'
Anne Lister and Ann Walker will forever now be my excuse for people who go "there weren't gays in the past."
My problem normally with the whole biography genre is that it lacks any nuance when it comes to the person they are talking about. They are either a hero, or a villain. They have nothing in between. Gentleman Jack, however, acknowledges the nuance and societal problems that Lister had to contend with. In many ways, she was ahead of her time, and in many ways she would be seen as backwards, especially when it comes to her views on politics, sexuality and religion as all they conflict with each other. Lister was able to make that conflict meld together and the book doesn't shy from her more nonpalatable views or actions to make it appealing to a modern reader.
I cannot lie when I say, Lister reminds me of my grandmother. My grandmother was a closeted lesbian who semi-came out after my grandfather died. She was a devote Christian woman, but she was often run-off from her church because they learned about her "roommate." And like Lister, many in the family didn't know she was lesbian until after her death and going through her diaries. There's gay people in our history, you just have to search for them. They're hidden, yes, but they're there.
Definitely a must read when it comes to LGBT+ history.
Lovely companion to a fantastic show. It's basically a closer look at the journal entries for the events of the show, with some background on the history of figures who feature less prominently, on Shibden Hall, and on the journals-as-documents themselves.
This book proved they didnt't change a lot for the TV series. Only some details were changed, like when Anne Lister hired her maid Eugenie. It was interesting to read her own words. This books tells the same story as the first series of Gentleman Jack but it adds in some interesting details.
Fascinating look at someone I knew nothing about til the HBO show began. Amazing woman ahead of her time.
I haven't watched the show, but this one came up as a BOGO option on an Audible sale so I decided I'd take a listen. I'm broadly familiar with her life and needed something not too difficult to parse and not too long because I'm awaiting the release of another title I'm going to immediately drop everything for when it comes out.
It might seem like a particularly odd choice because I haven't watched the show, but I was familiar with Anne Lister's life in broad strokes, and I don't mind that this was more or less a focused discussion of just a couple of very important years because I overall knew where things went.
I think it's fascinating to hear how much she was just MESSY. She was messy in the way people are now messy with regard to relationships/past loves/jealousies, people aren't different. People don't change. People are messy. And I really liked hearing about a real person's real messiness.
I also thought it was interesting to hear about the stress of dealing with someone who I think would nowadays have been understood to be dealing with depression or anxiety or both, and how little they understood how to deal with these 'episodes'.
Notwithstanding the actual historical context of two women who actually got married in a church (if not legally) in front of a congregation because it was important to Anne for it to be religiously sanctified. I feel like there's a lot we could learn about how the people of that time just let Anne get on with being herself, and how herself was lesbian AF and everybody pretty much knew it.
It might seem like a particularly odd choice because I haven't watched the show, but I was familiar with Anne Lister's life in broad strokes, and I don't mind that this was more or less a focused discussion of just a couple of very important years because I overall knew where things went.
I think it's fascinating to hear how much she was just MESSY. She was messy in the way people are now messy with regard to relationships/past loves/jealousies, people aren't different. People don't change. People are messy. And I really liked hearing about a real person's real messiness.
I also thought it was interesting to hear about the stress of dealing with someone who I think would nowadays have been understood to be dealing with depression or anxiety or both, and how little they understood how to deal with these 'episodes'.
Notwithstanding the actual historical context of two women who actually got married in a church (if not legally) in front of a congregation because it was important to Anne for it to be religiously sanctified. I feel like there's a lot we could learn about how the people of that time just let Anne get on with being herself, and how herself was lesbian AF and everybody pretty much knew it.
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced