Lister, Anne ___ 1791-1840 ___ British ___ n/a

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Lister was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, into a wealthy family. She seems to have discovered her homosexuality while a teenager at boarding school. Between 1809 and 1814, she was in a relationship with Isabella Norcliffe, but this gave way when she fell in love with Mariana Belcombe, but who in 1816 married Charles Lawton. By this time, Lister's mother had died, and Lister herself had inherited the family wealth. In 1924, she went to Paris to master French and to find a cure for a venereal infection passed to her by Marianna. Thereafter, she took an active interest in developing schools in the Halifax area, managed her estates, and even opened coal mines on her land. In 1832, she began an affair with Ann Walker, a rich heiress, who became her companion, and with whom she travelled widely. Lister died in 1840 in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, and Walker spent seven months bringing her body back to England to be buried in the local churchyard. Lister's diary - which was partly written in code and which has been edited and published thanks to Helena Whitbread - is remarkably detailed and candid about her active lesbian sex life.
A biography link
Wikipedia bio
The Diary Review - A violent longing

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1806-1839 ___ domestic social travel society farming commerce travel love/sex

WEB TEXT LINKS
many extracts
etext
a few pages

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
West Yorkshire Archive Service

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
I Know my own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister
No Priest but Love: The Journals of of Anne Lister
 

May 2005, July 2008, April 2013
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IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.