The Secret Diaries of a Regency Lesbian

Anne Lister,
Regency Lesbian

I finally managed to watch The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, a BBC production from 2010 that tells the story of Anne Lister, an upper-class Englishwoman who defied the conventions of her time to live and love as she wanted to.

Lister, for those of you unfamiliar with her story, lived in Halifax, in Northern England, from 1791-1840. And although her life overlaps quite a bit with that of Jane Austen, her life story and her diary reveal quite a different world than the one Austen recreates in her novels. Lister kept a secret diary, much of which was written in code, and the coded bits are, naturally, the juicy bits. In her copious diary, Lister details her love affairs with various women, as well as her interest in women and her disinterest in men.

Her diaries number 4 million words and naturally touch on many other subjects, but for historians of sexuality, her diary is most important for the way that Lister writes about her same-sex desires and her sexual identity. The “no homosexuals before 1900 rule” that many post-Foucaultian scholars considered to be (used to consider?) a hard and fast assumption seems ridiculous when we consider Lister. She clearly thought of herself as “a woman whose primary romantic and sexual attraction is to other women.”

Maxine Peake, left, as Lister, &
Anna Madeley as Mariana Belcombe.

The BBC production, however, was a disappointment. While Maxine Peake, who played Lister, seemed up to the part, she was miscast. She looks absolutely nothing like the portraits of Lister, with her bouncing red curls instead of Lister’s dark brown locks, and the script and story focused on portraying Lister as romantic, desperate, and hysterical. The time line of her life was truncated and mangled in the film, and there was no discernible story arc.

The basic narrative focuses on Lister’s problematic affair with real-life lover Marianna Belcombe (later Lawton) and Lister’s later successful relationship with wealthy heiress Ann Walker. The film also represents some of the other aspects of Lister’s life: her scholarly interests, the changes she made to her home, Shibden Hall, and her interests in engineering and coal-mining. The film also represents some of the negative reactions Lister faced to her increasingly masculine appearance and clothing and the suspicion surrounding her and her female “friends.” Some people in the area who knew of her odd ways called her “Gentleman Jack”—and not in a nice way.

Lister’s life could indeed make a wonderful, exciting, and thought-provoking film, but this one just wasn’t it. Far more interesting was the mini-documentary included in the special features on our disc, called “The Real Anne Lister” with Sue Perkins. The documentary includes interviews with various scholars who study Lister and Regency England, including Helena Whitbread who is the main editor of Lister’s diaries.

“The Real Anne Lister” takes us into Shibden Hall as it looks today and to the boarding school where Anne was sent as a teen—and where she had her first love affair with another girl. In between interviews with scholars and historians, Sue Perkins walks us through Lister’s life and loves, giving us a far more complete picture of Lister as a woman interested in intellectual pursuits, one who actively pursued other women at a time when such relationships were stigmatized, and one who had many other interests as well, including mountaineering, something the fictionalized film does not include.

 

Shibden Hall in Halifax, England.

Perkins presents Lister as a problematic figure, one who, as contemporary lesbians, we can admire for her boldness and her decision not to live in the closet, but who is also deeply troubling and perhaps even unlikable. Perkins notes in the documentary that Lister seems heartless at times, forgetting her lover from her school years, Eliza Raine (who died young after being sent to an insane asylum), and seducing other women thoughtlessly, selfishly. Perkins also faults Lister for being class conscious in her pursuit of other women, focusing mostly on women of the upper middle class and upper class—women like Lister herself.

A later portrait of Lister reveals the "mannish"
quality that eventually caused her lover, Mariana,
to leave her.

But we don’t have to like Lister in order to find her fascinating or a worthwhile person to study, especially when it comes to the history of sexuality. After all, no one is sitting around asking if they like Sappho or Don Juan as a person. Perhaps we should be asking, instead, what role does “likeability” and “relatability” have to play when we study real life persons in the past? Undoubtedly most writers of biographies come up against a fact or incident in the life of their subject that turn them off, or maybe even creates a permanent sense of dislike for this person that they are writing about.

Perhaps that was the reason I didn’t like The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. Aside from the pacing being a bit slow, I felt like I just didn’t like Anne Lister. And I wanted to. But her fictionalized character didn’t seem bold and brash, or even cold and cunning; she seemed desperate and a teensy bit annoying. I do hope that her story gets take up again, though, and remade into a better film (or mini-series, or even a musical!) because it’s a story worth knowing.

For every brash, bold, rich Anne Lister, there are dozens of other, quieter, lesser-known, or simply poorer women in history who loved other women and who defied conventions—perhaps in a less splashy way. Their lives are just as worth knowing and understanding as those of queens and duchesses, and their presence in the past suggests a more sexually diverse Regency world than most Austen adaptations present us with. 

On a positive note, the BBC production doesn't shy away from
representations of female same-sex desire and sex acts.