Helena Whitbread's Blog

The venues to which I am invited to speak about my work on the journals of Anne Lister are varied. The latest one was held in York at the York St John University a couple of weeks ago. I had been  approached by Sue Lister (no relation to the Shibden Hall Listers so far as I know) who runs the Real People Theatre group in conjunction with Ann Murray. She asked if I would contribute to a series of short vignettes, the overall theme of which was entitled ANNE LISTER AND HER LADIES. The idea was, to quote Sue, ” to chart the progress of women’s relationships from Anne Lister’s times through to the present.” The show ran for two nights, Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th March. The scenes were entitiled as follows:

Scene 1 (1816) – MARRIAGE?  Marianna tells Anne she is to marry Charles Lawton.

Scene 2 (1918) – FRIENDSHIP? The joy of Armistice Day but what of the future?

Scene 3 (1950s) – IDENTITY? First visit to the Gateways Club in London.

Scene 4 (1970s) – SEPARATISM? Some women want to live apart from men.

Scene 5 (1990s) – IMMIGRATION? How to stay together when your partnership is not recognised.

In each scene the lesbian heroine was named Anne.

The two final contributions to  the programme were:

The Story revealed by the Diaries: a talk by Helena Whitbread

and:

Audience Discussion – led by Jan Bridget.

Despite the chill of a cold March night both performances went very well. To quote Sue Lister once again –

” I would like to congratulate the whole cast for creating memorable scenes and a fascinating insight into lesbian relationships over the centuries. It’s a unique piece of theatre and I look forward to taking it to Shibden Hall on 29 June.

At this point in the long task of writing the life of Anne Lister I am facing the same dilemma which has dogged me almost from the beginning of my odyssey some seven years ago. Prior to beginning this biography I had already published two books of extracts from Anne’s journals* which cover the years 1816-1826.  Now, as her biographer, in order to avoid using her original words again and finding I have another book of extracts on my hands,  I have to find ways of using my own words to express those feelings about which she wrote so authentically in the Georgian style à la  Jane Austen. For instance, one of the most poignant descriptions she wrote of the dying of her love for Mariana Lawton lies in the following words. ‘…Love scorned to leave the ruin desolate, & Time & he have shaded it so sweetly, my heart still lingers in its old abiding place.’ [20th August 1823] To render that in the much more mundane language of today is extremely hard to do without losing some of the essence of heartbreaking melancholy and nostalgia for a vanishing dream which she conveys in that beautifully constructed, evocative sentence. I find myself thinking about the modern-day wag who transformed Wordsworth’s “I wander’d lonely as a cloud” into “I walked about a bit on my own”!!! Heaven forbid!

* The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister. (Virago 2010) and No Priest But Love (New York University Press. 1992),

The seaside town of Scarborough featured quite prominently at certain stages in Anne Lister’s life. Today I am starting a new chapter of Anne’s biography which concentrates on the time she spent there with her lover, Mariana Lawton. The relationship between the two women had now reached a crisis point. Mariana, entrenched in her life as a married woman with a rich Cheshire landowner husband, was becoming fearful that the nature of their relationship might be found out. In a letter written to Anne in the July of 1823, she had asked that Anne be circumspect, adding ‘…I had a feeling on the subject that no earthly power can remove & great as the misery which it would entail upon myself might be, I would endure it all rather than the nature of our connection should be known to any human being. [The journals of Anne Lister. 22.7.1823] Anne is disillusioned with Mariana’s lack of trust and snobbish concern with her respectability. ‘… She is too tamely worldly: her whole conduct is worldly to the farthest verge that craven love can bear.’ [ibid. 20.8.1823] Their sojourn in Scarborough is fraught with emotional difficulties which, to Anne, indicates that a crossroads in their relationship has been reached.

When Anne Lister arrived in Paris with her aunt in the spring of 1819, the proprietress of the hotel in which they stayed warned her against the impropriety of her headgear. ‘She said I could not go out in my little round hat & must have a bonnet. The next day Anne bowed to convention by buying a ‘yellow willow bonnet for seven franks & gave a frank for the black strings. On leaving Paris, she soon reverted to her usual small, black, round hat, even though it attracted attention from passers-by. As they neared Fleuri her headgear almost caused an accident. The occupants of a cabriolet were ‘so earnestly looking at me & my petit chapeau, the gentleman forgot to hold up his horses and down he came’. Reaching London, where all the women were wearing ‘large straw gipsy hats (bonnets)’ she once again found her small hat the focus of attention – ‘people stared at my little straw hat’.

When she arrived in Paris with her aunt in the spring of 1819, the proprietress of the hotel in which they stayed warned her against the impropriety of her headgear. ‘She said I could not go out in my little round hat & must have a bonnet. The next day Anne bowed to convention by buying a ‘yellow willow bonnet for seven franks & gave a frank for the black strings. On leaving Paris, she soon reverted to her usual small, black, round hat, even though it attracted attention from passers-by. As they neared Fleuri her headgear almost caused an accident. The occupants of a cabriolet were ‘so earnestly looking at me & my petit chapeau, the gentleman forgot to hold up his horses and down he came’. Reaching London, where all the women were wearing ‘large straw gipsy hats (bonnets)’ she once again found her small hat the focus of attention – ‘people stared at my little straw hat’.

Writing about the life of Anne Lister (1791-1840)  has consumed my literary and scholarly  life for the last three decades. The daughter of a minor landowning family in Halifax, West Yorkshire, Anne was  a remarkable woman who wrote about her secret life in the pages of her voluminous journals. As a lesbian who had to hide her secret love-life, she devised a code in which she could reveal her many love-affairs with women. I located her journals in my local archives  in 1983 and after much hard work in deciphering both her ‘plainhand’  and her ‘crypthand’ (to use her terms for the two differing scripts) I published two books of extracts. “The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister’ (published by Virago Press, London) and “No Priest But Love” (published by New York University Press). I am now engaged on writing a full biography of Anne. This blog will tell of my ongoing work on this huge project and, from time to time, touch on other related topics.