I’m not sure how I stumbled across the HBO series, Gentleman Jack, a couple years ago, but I was obsessed with it for a short while. When I realized I could read the diaries of the real-life Anne Lister the show was based on, I lost no time getting myself a copy of the ebook of the first volume.
Lister was a very prolific diarist, so her diaries have been divided up into multiple volumes, the first of which is called I Know My Own Heart, which references something she says in her diary in French at one point when talking about the fact that she realizes she’s attracted to women and not men and she’s OK with that.
I was impressed, not only with how readable this diary is, but how interesting it is. I expect most diaries to be full of mundane daily activities, but this one is full of gossip, thanks largely to the code Lister devised so she felt she could safely vent her true feelings.
Lister got around!
In the introduction, there’s a quote from an earlier Lister historian who says something to the effect that almost none of Lister’s female acquaintances “escaped” her seduction. I thought that was unlikely, but as it turns out, it was actually pretty accurate. Lister manages to have at least flirtations, if not outright sexual intercourse, with most of the women in her life. By the way, despite the fact that she was writing in code, she only refers to sex as “kissing” without going into any more detail. It takes some getting used to and looking at the context to figure it out.
Lister was in a long-term relationship with her friend, Marianna Lawton, who married an older man for his money, but kept up her relationship with Lister. The two women agreed that they would wait until Mr. Lawton died and then they would live together as a couple, but Lister didn’t appear to be able to keep her end of the bargain. Almost as soon as Lawton was out of sight Lister would be flirting with the newest arrival to the town, and when she received letters from Lawton, her feelings would vacillate between boredom/irritation and passionate love.
Lister also loved to travel and wrote extensively about her travels, although this volume contains just one trip to Paris and some traveling about England. I think my favorite was when she ended up at the house of two single women who have been living together for decades and Lister is pretty sure they’re lesbians. I wonder how that didn’t make it into the HBO series.
As much as I admire Lister for knowing her own heart and not being afraid to live her truth, I don’t think I would have liked her very much if I had known her in real life. She’s quite the snob, regularly “cutting” people she considers to be beneath her social standing and complaining in her diary about how “vulgar” so-and-so is (including her own father). She’s also very fickle, not only to Lawton, but to pretty much all the women in her life, and doesn’t even have the guts to admit it when they call her out on it.