Kneeling side by side under the medieval arches of the tiny church, two women bowed their heads and prayed.
Candles flickering around them, they took the sacrament at the altar.
But this was not a normal church service; in the lovers’ eyes, their “marriage” had been sealed.
It was 1834. Homosexual acts were illegal and sexual relationships between women were largely unacknowledged - the word lesbian had not even been coined.
| Anne Lister |
Anne Lister
THE FIRST MODERN LESBIAN
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| The intriguing Anne Lister of Shibden Hall |
The life and loves of Shibden Hall's Anne Lister
The fascinating story of a 19th century Halifax woman who dared to flout convention has been told on TV.
Tuesday 25 May 2010
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister was filmed around West Yorkshire.
Anne was a landowner, industrialist, traveller and prolific diarist who shared her life with her female lover at Shibden Hall in Halifax.
Claire Selby at Shibden says: "Anne was a complicated person and really just a fascinating character."
Inheriting the historic hall from her uncle in 1826, Anne Lister lived there until her death in 1840. She left behind diaries containing the most intimate details about her personal life, some of it written in a code which has only been broken in recent years.
| Portrait of Anne Lister |
My hero is not exactly heroic. There's nothing noble about Anne Lister (1791-1840) except in the technical sense of being "well born": she inherited Shibden Hall in Yorkshire from her uncle. Lister's less-than-noble attitudes are revealed in the 4m-word diary she kept, various selections from which have been edited by Helena Whitbread and Jill Liddington. (Whitbread's initial volume – which Virago is about to reissue – inspired me so much that I adapted it into my first play, I Know My Own Heart.) A stern snob who bullied her tenants into voting Tory, Lister despised women who were not ancient-Greek-spouting intellectuals like herself.
She also had the sexual ethics of a bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy. Why is Lister my hero, then? Because she looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there with unflinching precision. "I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs," she acknowledged on 29 October 1820. At a time when it was hard for genteel women to admit to any sexual drive at all, let alone one that caused them to fantasise about having "connection" with servant girls in huts, Lister faced the truth of her swaggering sapphism head on, and put it all down in the coded passages that make up about a sixth of her diary: the one place she told no lies.
Not only did Lister ignore her culture's rules about whom she should sleep with, she scorned the other rules of womanhood, too. Always dressed mannishly in black (and called "Gentleman Jack" by the locals), she remodelled Shibden estate, ran a colliery, was the first woman to climb several peaks in the Pyrenees, and finally formed a canny marriage of convenience and paired up with a neighbouring heiress. Not a saint, then, but a woman who seized her freedoms rather than waiting for anyone to grant them to her.
THE GUARDIAN2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm
2010