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.