Full citation:Roulston, Chris & Caroline Gonda, eds. 2023. Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archives to ‘Gentleman Jack’. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781009280723
At the time of writing, the ebook of this publication was available through Open Access at not cost at the following url: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/decoding-anne-lister/E6CFCB182F71891949C4709148422131
Foreword by Emma Donoghue
This is the collection of papers based on material from the Lister archives, approached from a variety of angles. [Note: Not all of the material touches on her sexuality, but I will blog everything, though some coverage may be briefer than others.]
The front matter includes a forward by Emma Donoghue, an introduction by Chris Roulston (one of the editors), and a conversation between Carolyn Gonda (the other editor) and Helena Whitbread.
Donoghue gives a brief background to Lister and an exploration of some of the facets of her life that are fascinating to modern researchers and the general public. She notes some of the curious paradoxes of Lister’s life and personality.
Introduction by Chris Roulston
Roulston notes the sheer magnitude of Lister’s diaries, and provides a capsule history of them. There has been a tendency to see the diaries as a unique artifact. The lack of comparable material from the era creates problems of interpretation, as it is difficult to determine how representative they are. The papers in this volume explore both how the Lister archives shed light on 19th century history, and how 19th-century history created the conditions in which Lister existed.
The unique nature of the archive lies behind how Anne Lister has become both a scholarly and popular icon. Her life participates not only in how we see the past, but how we engage with commemorating and presenting that past. There is a constant conversation in this volume between past and present.
Lister challenged norms of gender and sexuality, but also was strongly rooted in conservative social and political realities. Due to the private nature of the diaries and the use of encryption to obscure certain content, Lister’s diaries offer an unrivaled glimpse into one woman’s thoughts on her own identity and sexuality, how those factors affected her life, and how she strove to manage those forces.
One key factor in the 19th century (and neighboring eras) was the separation of female and male social spaces, and the general acceptance and approval of romantic and intimate friendships between women. Within this dynamic, for a friendship to shift into eroticism could be trivial.
Although Lister is the lens through which we are given a glimpse into these queer relationships, she is scarcely the only woman whose same sex eroticism is detailed in the diaries. Her lovers (and there were many of them) and certain acquaintances participated in homoerotic relations without necessarily sharing Lister’s gender transgression. At the same time, Lister was not unique in the 19th century in combining homoeroticism with gender nonconformity. (This part of the introduction is also serving as a survey of key prior scholarship relevant to Lister studies.)
Lister's gender identity existed in a liminal space. She considered her behavior “gentlemanly” and on a few occasions fantasized about having a penis or passing as a man. But when one lover suggested that she should have been born a boy, Lister protested that being male would have excluded her from free access to “ladies’ society.”
While some of her lovers enjoyed – or at least accepted – sexual relationships with men, Lister is always adamant about rejecting the idea of heterosexual marriage and feeling only revulsion for male attention. Yet the idea of marriage was a strong attraction and Lister’s steady goal was to find a female marriage partner and go through conventional ritual and symbolic forms associated with it.
Although Lister’s gender and sexuality are a continual theme in her diaries, the material encompasses multiple other topics, reflected in the five sections of this volume. The introduction then summarizes the contents.
1. Caroline Gonda in Conversation with Helena Whitbread
This interview allows Whitbread to provide a personal history of how she encountered and worked with the Lister archives.
This article traces one aspect of how Lister understood her gender and sexuality, that is, as a “natural” variation that was to some extent unique to her. Rather than projecting modern identity concepts back in time onto Lister, Shannon locates this understanding within the past and present philosophies of Lister’s own time with respect to the concept of “nature.”
[Note: I’m going to digress for a moment on a point that Shannon doesn’t address in particular. Discourse around homosexuality in classical philosophy up through the Renaissance included a theme that it was “against nature” (contra naturem), not so much in the sense of flouting the dictates of a personified Nature – although there was an aspect of that – but in the sense that it was considered part of the inherent nature of all creatures to desire at the opposite sex, and that behavior in contradiction to this went against what was expected to be people’s inherent “nature.” This is relevant to Shannon’s argument, because Lister is introducing a more multivalent concept of the range of inherent natures possible for human beings. That there is no single universal “nature” with regard to gender/sexuality, and thus people can diverge from the normative state without going against their individual “nature.” It’s very much a “born this way” argument but – as we’ll see – does not embrace homosexuality as a “type of person” collectively, but more along the lines of the “individual taste” concept that pops up regularly from classical times onward.]
When Lister writes about how she does and does not fit into society’s expectations along a number of axes, she continually returns to two themes: claiming the identity of “oddity” and asserting that this is her “nature,” connecting the concept with writings about natural history. This contrasts significantly with modern historians’ characterizations of her identity as transgression or non-conformity
The standard approach to natural history – entwined thoroughly with both classical writings and Christian philosophy – saw the world in terms of “creation” and a “creator.” The state of existence was a deliberate and conscious creation of an omnipotent deity, and the characteristics of creatures (= “create”-ures) were neither random nor accidental. [Note: As noted previously, within this understanding, behaviors that were considered “against nature” were thus considered a deliberate rejection of God’s intent, making them a moral failing.]
In developing an understanding of her own “nature,” Lister looked to texts that enumerated and celebrated the diversity of creation and the assignment of different “natures” to different creatures -- “each according to their kind.” Where Lister diverged from more traditional thought was in envisioning the existence of fractally individual “natures” to which one must be true. A person might be “odd” with respect to expectations while still acting according to their own nature.
Lister frequently describes herself -- in her journals or to others – as “odd” or having “my oddity” in the context not only of her sexual desires, but her clothing preferences and behavioral habits. But her oddity, from her point of view, was not a shared characteristic with other women who loved women, but a feature unique to herself. This puts a slightly different spin on Lister’s refusal to identify with terms she encountered in classical literature, such as tribade or fricatrix, or with “sapphist” which she explicitly rejects as an identity. After discussing their shared desire for women with Miss Pickford (an intellectual neighbor in a romantic partnership with another woman) Lister protests in her journal, “she supposed to meet like herself – how she is mistaken.” It seems to have been important to Lister to view herself as unique and special. She quotes one of her literary heroes, Rousseau, in her journal: “I am not made like any of those I’ve seen; I dare to believe not made like any of those who exist.”
Despite Lister’s fixation on uniqueness, “oddity” along with “singular” and “unaccountable” was a regular codeword associated with lesbianism or gender nonconformity in the 18th and 19th centuries (per Caroline Gonda).
The article now shifts to considering how Lister’s “oddity” is depicted in modern media and deployed symbolically by her modern fandom. The next section of the article explores other examples from the 17th to 19th centuries of interpreting “nature” broad-mindedly, or of discussions of divine creation that could be used to support such an interpretation.
Lister’s concept of her “oddity” encompassed more than sexuality. She describes how others responded to “my figure, manner of walking and my voice” commenting that people might notice such things but found them “agreeable.” [Note: We can’t entirely trust Lister’s perceptions here, but at least people told her to her face that they liked her “oddity.”]
Lister’s embracing of her own homosexuality as natural and positive did not extend to all possible flavors of queerness (by modern definition). She disapproves of being “connected to both sexes” (i.e., bisexuality), approving only of a consistent and exclusive desire for a particular sex. She approves only of same-sex desire that is experienced spontaneously and not “done from books.” [Note: I’m trying to envision what she means here, but it might be a reference to pornography.] She distains sex acts that involve anything not “natural.” Her disparagement of “saffic regard” is due to defining this as involving the use of a dildo. Her love is natural and constant; anything involving artifice or inconstancy falls outside her definition of “nature.” Nature might have “been in an odd freak” when creating Lister, but her desires were entirely due to that natural creation, and therefore were beyond judgment. She further notes – when researching anatomical theories of sexuality – that with respect to her own nature, “no exterior formation accounted for it, it was all the effects of the mind.” That is, for herself, she discards the popular idea of an anatomical cause for lesbian desire.
This article explores Lister’s sources of anatomical knowledge and how they affected her embodied understanding of erotic response. The question begins with an odd fact: although Lister first recorded the word “clytoris” in 1814, at age 22, it wasn’t until 17 years later that she describes clearly identifying her own clitoris. What can make sense of this for a woman who was deeply and clinically interested in her own sexuality?
The primary answer (to jump ahead to the conclusion) is that the ambiguity and vagueness of the materials she had available led to her confusing the cervix for the clitoris, and then not understanding how it was supposed to be at the seat of female pleasure.
The article lays out of the groundwork of prevalent theories about the analogy of male and female anatomy. Three elements contributed to her confusion. First, theories that described the vagina/uterus as analogous to an inverted penis, combined with descriptions of the clitoris as like a miniature penis, led her to expect it to be located inside the vagina. Second, although medical texts of the 16th and 17th century were the first to give technical descriptions of genital anatomy, including the so-called “rediscovery of the clitoris,” by the 18th to 19th century, focus had shifted to reproductive anatomy, in which the clitoris was not considered to participate. (In part, this was due to no longer considering female orgasm to be essential for conception.) Third, as medical texts became oriented towards a general readership that included women, descriptions related to sex and reproduction were made more vague and euphemistic. Lister also had to deal with texts that, when they did mention women’s non-heterosexual activities, did so disparagingly. Though Lister seems to have been adept at reading counter to such texts.
Due to Lister’s habit of recording her reading in detail, we can know exactly which textual materials she drew sexual knowledge from. We also know that she found references to female homosexuality in classical texts, and made lists of sexual vocabulary found there.
Although the classical material was disparaging of lesbianism, this doesn’t seem to have colored Lister’s views. It took her a little more effort to shake off the attitudes toward masturbation found in texts such as Onania. In early journals, Lister described her masturbation (carefully recorded with a cross in journal entries) as “shameful” and “a vile habit,” but these negative references disappear after 1825.
It was Lister’s practice, when touching on sexual matters in conversation, to feign ignorance until she had elicited the other person’s degree of sexual knowledge, and only then, if she judged it wise, to admit her own knowledge. We see this in her conversations with Mrs. Barlow, where she elicits Barlow’s opinion that there was “little harm” in sex between women, before engaging in a discussion of how they understood biblical references considered to touch on the subject. (They concluded that biblical “onanism” referred to coitus interruptus, and that the reference to women participating in “that which is against nature” referred to anal sex. Thus, they eliminated possible biblical condemnations of lesbianism.)
Lister developed a detailed vocabulary related to sexual experience. [Note: Some seems to have been an idiosyncratic use of ordinary vocabulary, but some may be drawn from existing usage that hasn’t been otherwise recorded.] In the Eliza Raine era, she uses “felix” (happy) to document sexual encounters as well as masturbation. Later, she uses “kiss” to document orgasm during sexual encounters, with various degrees of satisfaction described. “Kiss” could also be literal, and the dual meaning may have been adopted from the dual senses of French “baiser.” [Note: As Orr 2023 suggests, Lister’s “kiss” also appears to involve face-to-face genital contact, with the expectation of mutual pleasure.]
It isn’t clear to what extent Lister’s specific vocabulary was shared by her lovers as opposed to being private. In one case she records a lover referring to “using the fingers” in a context that Lister might have described as “grubbling.” This article provides the first source for “grubbling” (manual stimulation of a clothed partner) that I’ve encountered, noting that it’s included in Johnson’s dictionary as “to feel in the dark” with a citation from Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s The Art of Love as “to grubble, or at least to kiss.” There are earlier references to the word meaning “to grope,” so there’s a solid basis for believing that Lister picked it up from existing usage. (See also Turton 2023 following.)
Another Lister term that could be idiosyncratic or possibly picked up from dialectal usage is “queer” to refer generally to the female genitals, possibly connected to “quim” with the same sense. (See Lanser 2003)
The specific spelling “clytoris” in Lister’s first record of the word suggests she encountered it in the popular sex manual Aristotle’s Masterpiece, in which the spelling is found and which Lister records having read at various times between 1817 and 1821. This work was half sex manual, half erotica, but lacked illustrations. It describes the clitoris as the “seat of venereal pleasure” in women, as being similar to a penis and capable of erection, and as being located near the “neck” or “door” of the womb. (The book doesn’t describe the cervix.) Given the ambiguity of this description (“womb” might refer to the uterus or to the combination of uterus plus vagina) and to the suggestion of a far more prominent “erect clitoris” than most women were likely to experience, it’s understandable that Lister could have overlooked the actual organ in her search for something interior and more prominent. Various journal entries make it clear that she thought the cervix was what was being described, but her own examination failed to produce any pleasure from it, for herself or her lovers.
In contrast, Lister clearly understood the pleasure of stimulating “the top of the queer” and that orgasm was “produced on the surface.”
Being familiar with texts that attributed female same-sex desire to an enlarged clitoris, Lister considered whether this could be a cause for her own desires, but found no physical formation that could account for it. She did, however, speculate on the possibility that she could enlarge her clitoris – perhaps buy an operation – sufficiently to use it for penetrative sex. (This was during the era when she still thought the references were to the cervix.) She also speculated on whether it was possible for female ejaculation to cause pregnancy. [Note: This is before general understanding of the actual biology of fertilization.]
The article has an extensive discussion of Lister’s interest in, and pursuit of, scientific knowledge, which was a significant goal of her visits to Paris. It wasn’t until she studied the illustrated plates of the medical texts by the Cloquet brothers in 1831 that she finally was able to connect descriptions of the clitoris with its anatomical location – a discovery that she celebrated by “incurring a cross.
The French medical texts she studied tended to follow descriptions of the clitoris with theories about its enlargement and the association with lesbianism. While these discussions were negative in tone, Lister was quite practiced in reading against such texts, and doesn’t seem to have been infected with their attitudes.
[Note: check out Turton’s other articles on queer lexicography, especially Turton 2024. I’ll be skipping briefly over some topics he covers in those.]
This article, rather than focusing only on Lister’s sexual vocabulary, begins by examining her relationship and that of other lesbians to dictionaries and their coverage (or mostly lack thereof) of lesbian related vocabulary. Attempts to fill the gaps in this coverage – or at least commentary on the gaps – has included poet Judy Grahn’s invention of a history and definition for “bulldyke” when she could find none in existing publications, or Wittig and Zeig’s Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary, which symbolically left a blank page for the entry on Sappho.
Lister engaged with dictionaries in multiple ways: compiling a glossary of sexual vocabulary she found and eventually collecting as many as 39 dictionaries, both for language learning and specialized reference works. Using Lister’s extensive catalog of the books she owned and read, Turton explores her access to sexual vocabulary and her creation or adoption of words for her topics of special interest.
Lister’s journals document how she used dictionaries, not only for definitions, but to learn to correct spelling and pronunciation. Dictionaries of her time recognized that men’s and women’s use of language could differ, but – being written by men – this usually meant disparaging female usage and stylistics. Lexicographical sexism also meant that examples of usage were drawn from male authors even when the words were described as “women’s cant.”
Dictionary definitions of sexual vocabulary were often concealed by using Latin, under the assumption that few women would have access by that means. Lister was not immune to the impulse to control (other) women’s speech, disapproving of even her close friends using “vulgar language” that was no different from what she herself used in her own journals.
Lister was exposed to words like “tribade” and “olisbos” (dildo) via Latin and Greek dictionaries, as well as through classical literature. Medical dictionaries introduced her to words such as “clitoris” (see previous article) and their associated concepts such as “clitorisme” (to engage in sex with a woman using a clitoris).
Lister picked up and used slang and euphemistic terms for sexual concepts from her reading, but she also used terms that she may have invented – or at least, for which she is the earliest or only record. Her use of “queer” to refer to the genitals (evidently of either sex) has been explored in detail. (See Lanser 2003.) It isn’t always clear whether she used these terms in conversation or only in her journal. In some cases, she alternates a more common term, such as “courses” for menstruation, with a more idiosyncratic (or dialectal?) one like “cousin” for the same.
There are examples where it’s reasonably clear that Lister invented an expression, as when her journal traces the development of “going to Italy” to indicate a specific type of relationship, and provides many examples of it being used in conversations with Mrs. Barlow.
Another example of listers linguistic inventiveness was the development of a symbolic vocabulary for specific sex acts (a + or X or “cross” for orgasm, a glyph probably representing Greek “os” for the sex act she euphemized as “kiss”) as well as adopting specific symbols to name intimate friends.
Sometimes the ambiguity of ordinary words led her to clarify her meaning, as when she explained to Mary Vallance what she meant by “love” in order to make sure Vallance was answering the correct question. Lister (in common with many other female couples) used the language of marriage (marry, marriage, husband, wife, mistress) to talk about her relationships.
The lack of many surviving records from Lister’s correspondents makes it hard to determine which of her sexual vocabulary was shared, but there is at least one entry in Ann Walker’s diary where “k[iss]” is used in an implied sexual context. It would not be surprising if this usage was more common as it parallels French “baiser” with the same dual meeting.
The article notes a pre-existing use of “grubble” to mean sexual fondling or groping. There is also a discussion of the context of listers disparagement of “sapphic” love, which she associates specifically with a dildo.
[Note: It could be hard to determine whether this is a personal definition, or a product of the tendency of literature that uses the word “sapphic” to also participate in the 18th century fascination with dildos. I hope to be able to explore this question further as I expand my database of vocabulary examples – just as I want to question the assertion that the word “tribade” was strongly associated with the motif of the macro-clitoral lesbian.]
Looking at dictionaries from another direction, Lister herself has entered the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as part of an attempt to redress the work’s gender bias (expanding the work’s original 5% female content to 10%).
As Turton documents extensively in his 2024 book, vocabulary about female sexuality, and especially lesbianism, was deliberately excluded from the intended-to-be-comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary until its second supplement, published in 1972-86. But although the OED has made an attempt to include more women’s writing in its citation sources, none of the citations for “sapphic” are by a female author. Lister’s writings are cited under eight dictionary entries, none of them related to sexuality.
I’m going to skim over this article because it falls in the category of “scholarship about modern philosophical theories” and doesn’t really say much about Lister’s historic context. In this case, the modern theory has to do with the concept of the closet. So it analyzes Listers’ practices around concealment and management of her personal life, but does so in a framework based on 20th century ideas about being closeted. Many of the historic texts and frameworks that are discussed are not examined in terms of how Lister engaged with them, but rather uses them as metaphors. (Just as an example, there is a discussion of “crypt” as indicating an enclosed burial chamber, connecting this to the concept of “closet,” where there’s no basis for thinking this was a connection Lister made in speaking of her “crypt hand.”)
The article does bring in some interesting comparative topics, such as the use of code in other peoples’ diaries. But all in all, this article is of little value to an understanding of the historical context of Lister’s life.
As this article focuses on Lister’s political context and activity, it doesn’t have direct connections to her sexuality (though it does to her gender). Lister’s lifetime spanned a very busy political era for the UK, including the later consequences of the French Revolution, the rise of the industrial era, the abolition of the slave trade and then of slavery itself, and other significant events and changes. Through all this, Lister approached issues as a staunch Tory, supporting the Crown, the rights and privileges of landowners, and the special place of the Anglican church. Her attitudes paralleled those of some other female couples of her era, such as Ponsonby and Butler, in what Lanser has previously labeled a “compensatory conservatism” that may have acted to shield the radical aspects of her personal life. But – Lanser notes in the present article – it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The article explores not only the political landscape of her era, but Lister’s own actions and recorded thoughts. Fascinating reading, but I’m not going to summarize it further.
This interesting article traces the history of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, other similar civic organizations, Lister’s participation in those organizations, and gender issues around membership and activity.
As the article doesn’t touch directly on sexuality, I won’t be summarizing it in detail. One of the more interesting aspects is how Lister’s quest for personal education as well as for civic influence led her to break through some silent barriers for women. She was the first woman elected to the Halifax Lit & Phil – the members concluding that there was no formal bar to women, though none had previously been admitted, and no other woman was admitted during her lifetime.
Most such organizations were exclusively male, either by rule or de facto, but women were beginning to make inroads, especially in newly-created societies. Some organizations created special membership categories available to women, so they could attend lectures and have access to libraries, while retaining administrative control to membership categories only available to men.
Lister saw her membership and her investment in civic resources as a legacy-building function, for herself and the Lister name, as well as supporting the cultural importance of Halifax in general. Attending cultural events that were open to members of all classes provided a context for socializing more casually with those outside her personal circles. For example, Lister used them when courting Miss Browne – someone she was reluctant to engage in social visiting with due to their class difference.
This article, written by the Collections Manager for Shibden Hall, describes the history of the building, the changes that Lister made to it, and the site’s explosion of visitor interest in the wake of the TV series Gentleman Jack, which created some interesting curatorial dilemmas. Once again, I won’t be summarizing in detail, but will touch on a few topics of particular interest.
Lister’s alterations to the building – made possible by the profits from coal, but often outstripping that income – were part of a program to enhance the grandeur and significance of the family. Following the fashion for reviving medieval and Jacobean styles, some significant changes included opening up the main room to the full height of two stories, adding a formal staircase and gallery, and creating more physical and logistical separation between the family rooms and service areas and personnel. Although almost none of the furnishings from Lister’s day remain, the current physical structure is essentially as she left it.
Just as the structural changes were intended to increase the appearance of wealth and aristocratic legacy, Lister’s work on the estate functioned to move it away from the image of farmland to an estate prioritizing privacy and romantic landscaping. This included the creation of the “chaumière” cottage (featured as a romantic getaway in the TV series), whose location has not been identified.
As noted previously, very few of Lister’s furnishings and possessions remained with the estate. (For example, her library was sold off by a later owner, John Lister, who no longer had the advantage of coal income to help maintain the estate’s finances.) In addition to a few items that remain, the museum has been able to locate and acquire some objects of identifiable provenance, such as a traveling writing desk with an engraved plate reading “Miss Lister, Shibden Hall” that was found in France.
Although the museum has aimed to furnish the displays in a manner appropriate to Lister’s era, visitors often confuse the furniture and furnishings with actual historic artifacts, or with the TV sets and set dressing. Although Shibden Hall was used for some location shots for the TV series, much of the interior work used constructed sets, often enlarging the rooms beyond the original size for logistical reasons.
Clare provides an insider’s view of the balancing act of presenting such a famous – but somewhat fictionalized – site in a way that satisfies visitors’ desires while presenting accurate history.
This article analyzes Lister’s records in the context of travel writing. Although the desire to travel and its accomplishment were a significant part of Lister’s identity, my summary is going to be confined largely to discussions of her trip to Wales and the visit to Plas Newydd, the home of the Ladies of Llangollen.
Travel records not only document the sights and experiences, but also her advanced planning – how she researched the places she wanted to visit and what preparations she would need. While some of her travel writing was included in her regular daily journaling, in 1827 when she visited Switzerland and Italy, she kept a separate travel notebook, commenting that it allowed her to keep separate the more private material. (She also kept separate expense accounts.) As with some other aspects of her life, she considered publishing an account of her travels, but never did so. McHugh comments that while previous studies are focused on the more extraordinary aspects of Lister’s travels (and they were many), her journals are also valuable documentation of ordinary tourist practices of her day, and how they were changing.
Published itineraries and travel guide books are noted by Lister as part of her planning process, as she identified particular locations of interest and sketched out variable options for routes. Wales had become a popular destination for those with a Romantic sensibility, but Lister’s research also included geology, natural history, and industry.
Lister’s tour of Wales in 1822 began and ended in Llangollen, enabling her to arrange a visit. She was familiar with Ponsonby and Butler’s story from published accounts in newspapers and a 1791 article in La Belle Assemblée [sic]. [Note: the Wikipedia entry for La Belle Assemblée indicates that it began publication in 1806. It appears that the 1791 article being referred to is from the General Evening Post, which appears to be a reprint of an article titled “Extraordinary Female Affection” from Town and Country magazine, August 1790.]
[Note: Lister’s familiarity with Ponsonby and Butler is a good index to general public awareness of the couple and their “oddity.” Lister is surely not the only woman of the Georgian era who explored her own sexuality by contemplating Ponsonby and Butler’s lives.]
Published descriptions sometimes try to fit Ponsonby and Butler into a gender-differentiated model, framing Butler as the more “masculine” partner. Certain other visitors such as Lister’s neighbor Christopher Rawson commented negatively on their gender presentation. [Note: One wonders if, in that case, familiarity with Lister colored his attitude.] But most visitors were effusively positive in their views and Lister recorded that she saw no masculine affect to Butler. Lister’s commentary, both at the time and when later recounting the visit to Mariana, reveals that she saw in their lives a model for what she might aspire to. In crypt hand, she speculates that the relationship was not purely platonic. And Lister records a conversation with Rawson’s sister Emma (who had also traveled to Wales) who called them “two romantic girls” and said, “she had thought it a pity that they were not married; it would do them a great deal of good.” [Note: There’s a little more context for interpreting her comment in Gonda 2023, a couple of articles further into the collection. My initial reaction was to wonder whether we could distinguish between “it’s a pity they’re romantic friends and not married-equivalent same-sex partners” versus “it’s a pity that they can’t be married because they’re both female.” Certainly, women in such relationships called themselves “married” and this could have been Emma’s way of signaling her sympathy for Lester’s desires.]
Travel – which meant getting away from curious friends and family, as well as opportunities for forced proximity – provided Lister with chances to pursue romance with travel partners. Her relationship with Sibbella McLean developed while the two were traveling in Scotland.
Although there were many notable female travelers of the 19th century, traveling without male company – especially when it involved rough hiking and mountain climbing – was definitely considered unfeminine. Other female travelers drew similar negative comments to those Lister attracted. There was a careful balance to seeking adventure versus maintaining an unquestioned social reputation. Travel writer Sarah Murray, who was one of Lister’s sources, managed to stay on the “ladylike” side of the equation.
Excursions on foot typically involved the hiring of a local guide, though Lister sometimes found herself impatient with the need (or with the opinions of chance-met fellow travelers). [Note: having recently watched the BBC series The Other Miss Bennett, the mountain climbing episode in that show comes vividly to mind!]