As an illustration of how topics were handled, this section opens with “this treadmill business.” As part of her general curiosity about the world, and based on a recommendation by a friend, Lister decided to view and try out the penal treadmill at Clerkenwell prison. Public reaction to this event haunted her for some time.
Diaries (Anne Lister)
LHMP entry
When focusing on the Paris era, Orr found that existing edited material was deficient. Although Whitbread’s No Priest But Love focused on a similar period, she included less than 1/6 of the journal material for that era. Green cataloged 30 letters from the era, but included only 17 of them. Liddington emphasized the importance of incorporating other documentary material–account books, etc.—for a complete understanding.
In this section, Orr challenges the accepted ideas about the meaning and uses of Lister’s “crypt hand.” Most previous editors have presented excerpts from the diaries that do not clearly distinguish material recorded in cipher from that in ordinary writing. Whitbread notes the crypt hand was used to record Lester’s “intimate” (that is, sexual) life, creating the impression that her sexual and emotional observations were always encrypted and that crypt hand was used only for this purpose.
Each of the major editions of Lister material focused on selected aspects of her social or sexual identity at specific life stages. This disjunction mirrors similar disjunctions within lesbian and feminist history. Operating in the context of queer and feminist academics of the 1970s and 1980s, Whitbread and Faderman tended to view Lister’s sexuality through a modern lens, applying sexological theories, or viewing her as transmasculine.
This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.
The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
This is not so much an article about Anne Lister history as it is Anne Lister historiography. It traces the awareness of her life and diaries, both scholarly and popular. The article begins with a very brief biography that situates her life in time and space.
This is a general survey of sexuality in the 18th century. This summary only covers chapter 8 “Tribadism: A New Sort of Sin.” It opens with a quatrain from the satirical poem “The Adulteress” which unambiguously uses “tommy” in reference to sex between women, then move on to a summary of the life of Catherine Vizzani. The Vizzani text represents a medical view still focused on the one-sex model and the interpretation of lesbianism as a form of hermaphroditism.
This is a startlingly (I might say unexpectedly) excellent and comprehensive survey of lesbian-relevant history in Early Modern Europe. That actually makes it difficult to summarize (as well as difficult to tag, though I’ll give it my best shot). I think I’ll approach it by noting themes and topics, without necessarily trying to compose complete sentences.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
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