Visions: "Which made it look like a gentleman's": Anne Lister's Use of Lord Byron in Her Construction of a Gentlemanly Image

Abstract

Despite the rigorous study of Anne Lister's personal and public identities, scholars have only minimally acknowledged the ways in which Lister appropriated the ideas and practices of others to construct the image of herself they themselves are so fascinated by. From her teenage years onward, Lister collected ideas, images, and published works that broke with the traditional, conservative ideals on which she was raised and adapted them for her own use in expanding her queer identity. Of the scholars who do investigate Lister's use of the publicly queer, even fewer have thoroughly examined Lister's method of adaptation as a distinctly queer process of recognition and replication within the community-a process that, to some extent, still exists today. This paper aims to bridge a portion of this gap by examining Lister's use of Lord Byron and argues that in her reflecting the easily visible traits of other, more public figures like Byron, Anne Lister exemplifies a tradition of queer survival methods that have created a community built on recognition and visibility within while maintaining the ability to hide in plain sight without, existing in the space between seen and unseen.

Headnote

Abstract

Despite the rigorous study of Anne Lister's personal and public identities, scholars have only minimally acknowledged the ways in which Lister appropriated the ideas and practices of others to construct the image of herself they themselves are so fascinated by. From her teenage years onward, Lister collected ideas, images, and published works that broke with the traditional, conservative ideals on which she was raised and adapted them for her own use in expanding her queer identity. Of the scholars who do investigate Lister's use of the publicly queer, even fewer have thoroughly examined Lister's method of adaptation as a distinctly queer process of recognition and replication within the community-a process that, to some extent, still exists today. This paper aims to bridge a portion of this gap by examining Lister's use of Lord Byron and argues that in her reflecting the easily visible traits of other, more public figures like Byron, Anne Lister exemplifies a tradition of queer survival methods that have created a community built on recognition and visibility within while maintaining the ability to hide in plain sight without, existing in the space between seen and unseen.

Keywords

Queer Identity, Eighteenth-Century, Women's Writing, Sexuality, Diaries

Since Anne Lister's nearly four-million-word collection of diaries was first translated and partially published in the mid-80s by two primary historians, Helena Whitbread and Jill Liddington,1 scholars have been fascinated by Lister's negotiation of her queerness in the early nineteenth century and the identities she used in this negotiation. Though she lacked the specific language of queer identity that has developed during the time since her death, Lister clearly defined her sexuality, saying in 1821, "I love & only love, the fairer sex & thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs" (qtd. in Whitbread 161).2 This and her many other unequivocal statements of her love for women defined the early years of scholarship surrounding Lister, placing her firmly within the growing field of gay and lesbian studies and the history its scholars were attempting to excavate following years of suppression (Colclough 160). However, despite the rigorous study of Lister's personal and public identities,3 an aspect of Lister's identity that has been explored minimally by scholars is her conception and construction of a gentlemanly persona. Lister's gentlemanly identity built on the common performance of wealth and respectability that is associated with the term to include a queered version that was not dependent on gender but rather on sexuality. In this queering of the concept, Lister seems to have followed in the steps of the queerest gentlemen of her time: Lord Byron, who made his own gentlemanly persona one that was as iniquitous as it was respectable. This paper aims to bridge a portion of this gap by examining Lister's use of Lord Byron's gentlemanly persona and argues that in her reflecting the easily visible traits of other, more public figures like Byron, Anne Lister exemplifies a method of survival in which historical queer women can claim visibility and power through coding their queerness.

Throughout her life, Lister used Byron's style of writing and coding as a mode of communication between herself and her potential sexual partners, taking an appreciation for his works, specifically Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, as a sign of possible compatibility (Steidele 77). Lister saw Byron as recognizably queer in a period in which for anyone else it would have been dangerous to be seen as such.4 In their introduction to queer Romanticism, Michael O'Rourke and David Collings call Byron an "iconic figure for queer Romanticism" in everything from his overtly sexual and queer writing to his disability. Though identifiable queerness had not been widely codified like it is today, Lister was still able to distinguish Byron as someone outside of the heteronormative society in which she regularly operated. By adapting his persona and shaping her own around it, Lister was not simply vying for acceptance in her local community but for also for recognition within the queer one. Though her genderbending and gentlemanly persona granted her privileges more feminine women were denied, it also made her visible to other queer people, allowing her to hide in plain sight despite the significant backlash she likely experienced due to her queerness. In using Byron's work as a form of coding, Anne Lister shows that she recognized Byron as more than just a symbol of the gentleman that aligned with her nonconformity; she saw him as a distinctly queer figure that would translate to other queer people.

Lord Byron's rise to fame, and entrance into Lister's awareness, began with the publication process of his poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In his examination of Childe Harolds publication, Nicolas Mason calls the work from creation to print "not only a turning point in literary and advertising history but, just as important, a key moment in the commodification of the aesthetic" (440). Its success was born out of a consorted two-part effort to make the name of Byron famous and tie his work directly to the caricature he created for that fame. Mere weeks before the poem was scheduled for publication, Byron gave a spirited antiTory speech in the House of Lords that dominated conversations in London (431). The mixed reactions to Byron's speech forced his publisher to rush a depoliticization campaign around the poem, explicitly tying it to Byron's travels as a fictionalized travelogue and making Childe Harold a stand-in for Byron (434). This connection is part of what popularized Byron's gentlemanly persona as Childe Harold as the character creates a reclusive, mysterious, and worldweary version of the gentleman that Byron would emulate in his own life. Byron again ties himself to his main character in Don Juan by using his real travel experiences. In this version, he emphasizes the libertine aspect of his gentlemanly persona by placing Don Juan in sexually coded situations like when he accidentally becomes part of a harem and is forced to cross-dress. This contemporarily sexually explicit element of his work became part of Byron's brand as he "created the glamorous sexy youth of brash, defiant energy, the new embodied in a charismatic sexual persona" (qtd. in Saglia 14).5 This persona that expanded the English gentleman into something mysterious and sexual became the Byronic character, and Anne Lister, after witnessing its creation, seems to have adapted it for her own use.

Though she never explicitly says that Byron's own persona is her model for her gentlemanly identity, Lister's fascination with Byron and his works suggest that he was at the very least an unintentional influence. Don Juan is one of the most mentioned works in her diaries in both general comments and recollections of conversations, despite her regular acknowledgement that it was a controversial poem for women to be reading. Shortly after its release, she writes about a conversation she has with a group of party guests in which she is open about reading Don Juan: "Told Mr Saltmarshe my opinion of Don Juan. Emma told me afterwards she had read it at Elvington but durst not own to Kit that she had read more than a part of if" (qtd. in Whitbread 141). A few weeks later, however, she writes that when an older woman in the community asks if she has read the poem that she "would not own it" (147), explicitly recognizing that its controversial nature. Likely because of this, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is also mentioned throughout her diaries as a more common conversation topic. Where Don Juan was controversial, Childe Harold was less explicit and more accessible via libraries throughout the early nineteenth century, and Lister used this to her advantage in one of the first romantic relationships she recorded in her diaries (St. Clair 254). In 1818, she met Miss Brown, a wealthy young woman from Halifax, who shared Lister's appreciation for the early cantos of Childe Harold. After their meeting, Lister writes about "sending her a Cornelian heart with a copy of his lines on the subject" (qtd. in Whitbread 53), and the poem appears throughout their relationship in both physical and conversational forms. Where the provocative nature of Byron's other work would have been suspicious for two young women to discuss and gift each other openly, Childe Harold served as a popular alternative that roused little suspicion without losing the feeling of sensationalism that came with all things Byron.

These mentions of Byron alone are not enough to argue that Lister adapted Byron's persona and coding strategies as part of her gentlemanly identity. However, significant cultural evidence suggests Lister was intentionally appropriating the image of Byron in particular to further her status and express her personal identity in a way that was simultaneously hyper-visible through its abnormality and invisible within her cultural context. When examining Lister's Byronic gentlemanly persona, Clara Tuite calls Lister "a leading example of the commodification of aristocracy which marks Romantic culture: literally, a gentrification of Byron" and an embodiment of the "elusive fetish of the gentleman" (190). The "fetish of the gentleman" of which Tuite writes is a cultural phenomenon in which the image of the gentleman-a handsome, respectable, and well-connected man-was used as a tool to climb the social ladders of England on image alone rather than through wealth (187). Byron himself is illustrative of this in the elaborate publication of Childe Harold through his version of the gentleman, as his search for celebrity was ultimately born from his anxiety over class and social standing following his choice to become an author (Mason 427). However, Byron's use of the gentleman was one of the most public of its time and was marked by Byron's lack of conformity to the traditional gentleman through the explicitly sexual elements of his works and persona. Lister's adaptation of the gentleman was part of a cultural phenomenon in which the only abnormality was her gender as she, too, was trying to give the appearance of a higher status than she and her family actually possessed. Though the Listers were a landowning family in Halifax, they sat on the lower cusp of the upper- class, and Lister herself intended to change that. Byron's version of the gentleman, though controversial, was a version that would have allowed for Lister's own libertine bend as well as her natural flare for the dramatic and public, making it the more favorable version for Lister to use as inspiration. In using the figure of Byron as her basis of a gentlemanly persona, Lister was able to express her queer identity without sacrificing her respectability. Additionally, she was actually able to raise her social status by presenting as someone who did not align with traditional femininity and the lack of legal power associated with women during the period (Choma and Wainwright ix).

Anne Lister is not the first nor the last queer woman to create for herself a persona that broke with traditional femininity; in fact, she is part of an extensive history that has only recently been excavated. Susan Lanser's The Sexuality of History thoroughly explores the various performances sapphic women used in order to navigate a history that often erased them, including the "codes of gender and gentility" (115). Her article "Queer to Queer" expands specifically on historical queer women's use of masculinity and how the definition of female masculinity shifted throughout the period in which Lister lived. Lanser's work in exploring the sapphic body and its performances is particularly helpful when examining Lister because it deals specifically with the use of masculinity to claim power or respectability, a practice that Lister regularly engaged in (136). Similarly, Jack Halberstam's Female Masculinity further explores women performing masculinity throughout history and how those performances affect their social images. Halberstam's approach to this history differs from Lanser's in that where Lanser endorses broad terms like "sapphic body" for describing historical figures, Halberstam argues for more specialized terms that include the language of the period as well as the figures' performances. To Halberstam, Lister's performance of masculinity is closer to that of the historic term "female husband"6 as she expresses no desire to be a man but is still regularly confused for a man because of her performance of masculinity, especially after marrying Ann Walker (68). While Lister's performances and persona fit cleanly into these approaches to the history of queer performance and female masculinity, a very specific aspect of Lister's identity that these approaches do not account for is her negotiation of masculinity and femininity through her use of a gentlemanly persona.

Throughout her entire collection of diaries, Lister offers a clear and consistent description of herself in everything from how she dresses to how she acts while in public, and one of the most specific terms she uses to describe herself is as a "gentleman." Though she does sometimes use "gentlewoman" to describe herself and other women on occasion, she often uses "gentleman" in cases in which she wants to emphasize her queerness and her social performance. One of the most explicit of these uses is in her account of a party in which one of her lovers seems to have been jealous of her interactions with another woman. Lister dismisses her jealousy in her diary entry by stating, "Am certainly attentive to her but cautiously, without any impropriety that could be laid hold of. Yet my manners are certainly peculiar, not all masculine but rather softly gentleman-like. I know how to please girls" (qtd. in Whitbread 152). This specific instance exemplifies several major aspects of Lister's version of the gentleman. The first is that she directly connects her manners and sense of propriety to her "gentleman-like" persona, and this extends beyond herself to every person she calls a gentleman in her diaries. For example, she begrudgingly calls her former lover's husband "gentlemanly in his manners" when visiting the couple (232), calls the couples' priest about whom she was hesitant "clever & his style & manner gentlemanly in the pulpit" (233), and dismisses her father as untrustworthy after he "lost the manners of a gentleman" (156-157). Connecting respectability and status to the concept of the gentleman is a natural leap for Lister to make because respectability is one of the most common attributes of the term. The second major aspect of her gentlemanliness that Lister highlights here is that she does not consider her form of the "gentleman" necessarily masculine. Lister's conception also aligns with the increasingly popular form of the gentleman during the nineteenth century as the status of gentleman was tied to traits that were not perceived as inherently masculine like wealth, status, and general sociability (Young 6). The third connection Lister draws to her gentlemanly persona at the end of this statement is one that was not necessarily part of the mainstream, and that is to a flirtatious and even promiscuous version of the gentleman. She makes this connection even more explicitly earlier in her entries during an account of a conversation with one of her early romances, Anne Belcombe, about her tumultuous love life: "Talked of the abuse I had had for romance, enthusiasm, flattery, manners like those of a gentleman, being too particularly attentive to the ladies, etc." (qtd. in Whitbread 6). To Lister, the title of a gentleman is not just defined by her sociability but by her success with women. Indeed, this version of the gentleman is one that traces back to one of the most famous gentlemen in England, Lord Byron.

While his works served very specific roles in Lister's life, it was Byron himself and his carefully sculpted gentlemanly image that most shaped Lister and her identity. Lister was very aware of and often emulated aspects of Byron's publicized persona, especially those that were highlighted around the publication of Childe Harold. In everything from how she dressed to interactions with the people around her, Lister bore striking resemblances to the persona and literary heroes of Byron. For example, both Byron and Lister created for themselves the image of an annoyed gentleman, maintaining their cordial manners within their active social lives while also giving the appearance of disinterest and superiority. For Byron, this performance was explicit in his wife Annabella Milbanke's recollections of her husband upon meeting him at a party in London where Milbanke took notice of his "disdainful expression... restless eyes, and the frequency with which he masked the impatient twitch of his full lips with his hand" (Seymour 30). This was apparently a common tactic for Byron when curating his persona. He worked to imply impatience for socializing while maintaining a courteous appearance that balanced out into the image of a restless gentleman. In examining this part of Byron's identity, Gabriele Poole says that Milbanke saw this impatience for socializing as his true feelings-a side-effect of his restless mind and seemingly endless wealth of energy. However, Poole argues that even this was also likely fabricated by Byron, as in more private settings away from the prying eyes of the public, Byron was often "extroverted, care-free, and affectionate" with those around him (8). This fracturing of his identity between public and private spheres gave Byron the ability to highly regulate his image and align it with a more mysterious version of himself, one that was emotionally disconnected from those around him and unencumbered by personal attachments. Additionally, by hiding this more gregarious side of himself in public settings and relegating it to private ones, Byron maintained a persona that matched the troubled, anti-social heroes used in his literary works like the dark hero Don Juan or the brooding Manfred-the same heroes that shaped Anne Lister's method of constructing her own gentlemanly persona.

When Lister constructed her own version of the gentleman, she, too, painted herself as someone who diligently preserved a wide distance between herself and those around her while also creating a brand of her own within Halifax. Throughout her journals, she expresses her distaste for the people of Halifax, saying about one of her neighbors, "Thank God I have nothing to do with their parties, nor do I intend it ever" (qtd. in Whitbread 47). She goes on tangents about the frivolity of her female company, saying that one of her acquaintances "is the image of her father everything" and that she "does, & often will, let herself down" (114). In contrast, Lister prides herself on what she saw as a comparably virtuous pursuit: her intense academic career. Throughout her journals, she can be seen bemoaning interruptions to her studies, saying at one point, "It is about 2 years since my first begging Sophocles [.] but I have had long & many interruptions during this time. [.] will now stick with Greek till I have mastered it, let this cost me what time & pains it will" (166). Her appreciation for her studies, specifically her study of classical literature, is also likely a reaction to Byron and his use of classical texts throughout his work (Clark, "Anne Lister's" 37). Because of this appreciation of academic pursuits over the company of other people, along with her position as a landowner and employer, she became an outsider within her community and gained a snobbish reputation that, when she was unable to travel, caused her to socially seclude herself at Shibden. Despite her reputation, however, Lister's status and wealth also made her a popular guest within Halifax because her presence brought with it a sense of respectability. This tension between her anti-social personality and her value in terms of social status shaped her into a sort of a local celebrity. With so much of both her persona and her perception of a celebrity and gentleman shaped around Lord Byron in the wake of Childe Harold, Lister essentially became the Byron of Halifax. With her presence at events marking the hosts' social status, and her personal company becoming a status symbol flaunted within the community, both these aspects outweighed the personal slight of her harsh opinions (Whitbread 15). Lister's celebrity status in Halifax brought with it a certain amount of protection for her to express her non-traditional and often markedly queer identities. The Romantic period was marked by "transgression[s] of social norms," and Byron's persona and his work were symbols of this (Clark, "Secrets and Lies" 61). By becoming a celebrity and gentleman, especially one that directly mirrored the ultimate celebrity gentleman of the period, Lord Byron himself, Lister was able to create a mask of respectability and social status. This mask of respectability and the elevation of her social status due to increasing celebrity gave her the ability to express her queerness in a way that allowed her to avoid being ostracized by her conservative community despite her often abrasive personality and lack of traditional social conformity.

However, it was not just Byron's disinterested celebrity persona that Lister mirrored within her own version of the gentleman; she also reflected several visual and physical aspects of Byron and the gentlemanly persona that he purposefully integrated into his image. In modern literary studies, the "Byronic character" brings to mind the image of a tall, dark, and handsome figure, and to an extent, Byron himself upheld that. Though Byron did not have a distinct style of dressing, he maintained his wardrobe in a way that hid his flaws and accentuated his features that fit within the image he was trying to create. Because of his eating disorder he suffered from throughout his adult life and the weight fluctuations it caused (Baron 1697), Byron was known to wear loose clothing and shoes that hid his clubfoot (Simonsen 164). These subtle ways in which he dressed show how he adapted his image to conceal the flaws he saw in himself and allowed him to control his public image even more, maintaining the picture of an able-bodied gentleman that was so necessary to function in the public eye of nineteenthcentury England.

Lister followed in Byron's footsteps by creating her own style that fit into the form of a Georgian gentleman and used that gentlemanly persona to perform her own version of masculinity. In 1817 after her lover, Mariana, married a man, she "entered upon [her] plan of always wearing black" to symbolize her mourning (qtd. in Whitbread 24). This choice was a very dramatic and public sign of mourning for a relationship that was such a tightly held secret as well as a drastic shift away from the conventional fashion of the time. For the majority of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women of upper classes wore light colors, specifically white, and dress shapes were continually shifting to keep stride with fashion trends and technologies. Conversely, men's clothing was dominated by dark, heavier fabrics and fewer structural changes throughout the decades (Cunnington 16-17). Lister's choices imitated this. Along with a sea of black fabric, her clothing imitated men's fashion with a mixture of both masculine and feminine undergarments; a penchant for militaresque detailing, such as a particular style of pelisse dress that mimics the jacket of the British military uniform; and unstructured skirts that ignored the quickly widening petticoats and crinolines of the early Victorian period. The latter of these choices is particularly significant, as the lack of structure worked directly against the goal of nineteenthcentury skirts to encumber and hide women's legs (Klein 138-139). Lister was already a tall, androgynous figure on her own, and her change of wardrobe only furthered her visibility within her community, gaining her the nickname "Gentleman Jack" (Whitbread xxii). She embraced the originally derogatory name wholeheartedly and even bragged in a journal entry that, "the people generally remark, as I pass along, how much I am like a marí' (60). This pride she felt upon being confused for a man is emblematic of her view of her own masculinity as something that gave her power that other women-including other queer women with whom she was acquainted-were not afforded. In mixing both masculine and feminine, Lister was not just bending her gender; she was solidifying her position as a gentleman in all but sex and guaranteeing herself a form of queer survival.

It is important to note here that Lister's gentlemanly appearance did not go unquestioned within her social spheres, the attention it drew, as well as the ways in which Lister navigated that attention are emblematic of a transitional period in the aesthetics of queerness in England. After her prideful account of people confusing her for a man, Lister also describes a specific reaction three men had when she passed them on the road: "As I went, three men said, as usual, 'That's a man' and axed [sic] 'Does your cock stand?"' (61). This interaction, which is implied to be one of many though Lister rarely includes any negative reactions to her masculinity, serves as an example of the common interpretations of queer and masculine women throughout pre-modern England and the backlash they received during the time. As Susan Lanser discusses in her article on the historical Sapphic body, beginning in the sixteenth-century, women presenting themselves as masculine were categorized "hermaphrodites," or the modern term "intersex." This equation was extended to explain female homosexuality as it was assumed that women who engaged in same-sex practices had some form of penis equivalents (23-24). Though this connection between masculinity and female homosexuality became more tenuous throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with scholars and lay people alike associated masculinity with sexual promiscuity (25), by the time Anne Lister began shifting her appearance towards one of androgyny, people were once again associating female masculinity with homosexuality (37). Lister was clearly aware of this growing perception of queer women, especially within her interactions with other queer women. During the period in which she is courting a local woman named Elizabeth Browne, she discusses using her masculinity as a means of flirting, saying, "She begins to like me more than she is, perhaps, aware... I much mind I do not get into a scrape. Wishing I was a gent; I can make her believe anything, etc.; bespeaks my influences" (qtd. in Whitbread 94). This interaction implies that Browne was attracted to Lister's masculinity, and that is confirmed when she continues: "She mentioned on the moor my taking off the leather strap through the handle of my umbrella, which made it look like a gentleman's. I said I would do if she asked me but not otherwise. She asked & I instantly did' (94). This interaction in particular is one that convinces Lister that Browne recognized her attention as more than friendship, as Browne's request for her to remove the strap from her umbrella makes Lister appear even more masculine, and thus the two of them look more like a traditional heterosexual couple. Throughout the nineteenth-century, umbrellas were seen as inherently masculine and women were expected to carry decorative parasols instead (Norris and Curtis 37), the latter of which often included wrist straps whereas the former did not until later in the century. Their mutual recognition of Lister's masculinity as correlating with her homosexuality is emblematic of a growing trend in the perception of queer women in the nineteenth century, with terms like "tommy" and "Sapphick" entering conversations concerning relationships like Lister's (Lanser, "Queer to Queer" 39). Thus, Lister's purposeful performance of masculinity does not come without the risk of raising suspicions; however, the protections and other benefits it offered outweighed those risks, especially after she became a landowner.

Lister's use of the image of a gentleman extended beyond just offering her protection; it brought her genuine power. She was not the first choice to inherit Shibden Hall. Her bachelor uncle had been controlling the family estate for years when she came to live with him and his sister during her late teenage years. Her brother, Samuel, was the favored of the surviving Lister children to claim the estate, but he drowned at the age of twenty, leaving Anne and her sister Marian as the only Lister children of their generation to live into adulthood (Liddington, Female Fortune 10-11). As the eldest and most educated, Anne became the presumptive heir and moved to Shibden to begin learning the ins and outs of the estate. Lister was first written into her uncle's will in 1822. She partially inherited Shibden Hall after her uncle's death in 1826, but she did not gain full control of the estate until her aunt died in 1836. In the eleven years between her move to Shibden and her initial inheritance of the estate upon her uncle's death, Lister shaped her masculinity and reputation around her goal to eventually restore Shibden to its previous grandeur. As soon as she had the freedom to do so, she began renovating the house to reflect the Tudor style in which it was originally built by installing a new grand fireplace and adding a gallery into the main room, "creating the effect of an open medieval manor hall" (Oram 539).

This change in appearance was emblematic of the most important change Lister intended to make, which was to reinstate the estate's coal pits and gain some form of control over the local coal trade. As Jill Liddington argued in her article on the Shibden coal pits, Lister's independence and intelligence made her a formidable competitor within the local economy (68-69).Rather than inhibiting her, her lesbianism and the masculinity through which she expressed it only added to her power. By the end of her life, she was in control of the Shibden pits as well as those owned by the Walker family as she had unofficially married the family heiress, Ann. Her relationship with Ann accentuated her masculinity even further as she was recognized by other landowners as the representative of both estates, and thus she could not be dismissed as a "wife dutifully helping her husband with the accounts or a widow keeping the family business going for her son" as so many women of the period were (82); she had too much power. Importantly, that power explicitly came from her queerness. While her uncle would not have normally allowed the estate to be controlled by a woman, Anne Lister's open admission that she would never marry a man convinced him that the estate would be protected. Lister confirms this in her diary shortly after he agrees to make her heir, saying that he had "no high opinion of ladies-was not fond of leaving the estate to females. Were I other than I am, would not leave his to me" (qtd. in Liddington, Female Fortune 19). In leaning into her queerness, Lister found genuine power that many women could not have claimed during her time. Though it was likely not without its direct backlash, Lister's queerness ultimately allowed her the power and privilege she needed in order to live as openly as she did.This ability to live relatively openly as a lesbian was incredibly important to Lister as there was one vital difference between her persona and Byron's: where Byron's isolation was mostly fabricated, much of Lister's was genuine. She was physically removed from her community, as Shibden Hall and its sprawling estate were almost three miles outside of the proper town of Halifax, and, as mentioned earlier, the company available to her in Halifax was limited by her lack of social niceties. However, according to both her journals and letters, the area where she was most isolated was in her longing for genuine companionship. Though she masked her search for a partner under the guise of growing her assets through combining them with that of another wealthy woman, there are several moments throughout her account that suggest she was not searching for financial comfort but for a cure to her constant loneliness. After Mariana's marriage and before she married Ann Walker, Lister had several relationships, but none brought her more happiness than grief and many were unrequited. One of these was the courting period between herself and Elizabeth Browne, towards the end of which she wrote, "I cannot feel that she is, or ever can be, all to me I want & wish. Oh, that I had some kindred spirit & by whom, be loved... How sweet the thought that there is (still) another & better & happier world than this" (qtd. in Whitbread 113). This moment of both frustration and loneliness is one of the few cracks Lister shows in her diaries. Throughout the majority of her writings, she portrays herself as a person with an unending supply of determination, one that can overcome any obstacle that lay in her path. But this moment shows her one weakness: an utter lack of companionship, either platonic or romantic. A few years later, over a decade before she would meet and marry Ann Walker, she showed another explicit moment of despair, writing, "There is one thing that I wish for. There is one thing without which my happiness in this world seems impossible. I was not born to live alone. I must have the object with me & in loving & in being loved, I could be happy" (272). Shortly after this entry, she wrote to her friend, Sibella, saying, "Give me a mind in unison with my own, and I'll find the way of happiness - without it, I should feel alone among multitudes; and all the world would seem to me a desert" (qtd. in Green 87). This is not the plea of a woman whose scheme for financial security was foiled, but of someone who is desperate for some form of companionship. Her lonely anguish both in and out of relationships is a running theme throughout her diaries and highlights a very specific question about queer community within Georgian society: What happens when an identity is undefined?

Though male homosexuality was criminalized by the British Parliament in 1533, Byron and other queer men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were able to claim spaces and communities of their own. Despite male homosexuality being clearly defined in social and legal spheres by the end of the eighteenth century, which brought with it a new level of organized persecution that had previously lacked clear means of enforcement, communities formed in which queer men were accepted and protected both by each other and by compassionate friends and family (Crompton 33). Within these communities, personal writings from the period show that queer men were able to speak openly about their sexuality and even brag about their exploits, living in relative openness despite the danger waiting just outside their communal spaces (Crompton 14). Though it was a far cry from the communities seen today, male homosexuality had spaces, histories, and communities of which men like Byron were aware and in which they were welcomed and even encouraged to participate.

Female homosexuality, on the other hand, was neither legally nor socially defined during this period. As Jack Halberstam explored in "Perverse Presentism," this lack of definition presents both challenges and advantages to queer historical studies in its inability to clearly define queer women and the multiple possible definitions it offers (46). The same applied to queer women's lives during the period. The lack of legal and social definition in England meant that women who had sex with women were rarely prosecuted for sexual indecency, and when they were, contemporary thoughts and laws surrounding sex defined sex as an act requiring a penis and thus made it difficult to find women guilty of sexual contact (Bennett 6). Where this lack of definition benefited queer women legally, however, it also harmed them socially. With no formal way to define themselves and lacking a specific plight around which to build a community for the protection and acceptance seen in queer male circles, queer women were often alone in their discovery of their sexuality. Though her journals and letters show that she maintained both romantic and platonic relationships with other queer women throughout her life and that she had a broader knowledge of lesbianism in England and Europe, Lister was never part of any clear community of queer women(Clark, "Anne Lister's" 40). Her platonic relationships were disjointed, and her sexual encounters stemmed primarily from what she saw as subtle clues and actions between her and the women she admired rather than from the established spaces and groups Byron alluded to in his writings and was known to inhabit.

In spite of her own lack of community, Anne Lister has become a symbol of historical queer survival. In the mid-1890s, she was almost erased from history. Approximately a fifth of Lister's diaries were coded in her personal shorthand that she and a classmate created during her time at an all-girls boarding school in York.7 Finding security in what she believed was an impenetrable barrier behind which she hid her most personal thoughts, opinions, and experiences, Anne saw no reason to physically hide her diaries. However, that barrier was threatened shortly after her death when a young Dr. John Lister, her distant relative, arrived at their ancestral estate of Shibden Hall in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where he found the journals and became determined to read them. A few years later, he and his friend Arthur Burrell began to decipher the coded sections of her writing with nothing but the keyword "hope" found on a slip of paper. Though Burrell suggested that the diaries be burned because of their "intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many 'friends'" (Steidele 9), John refused and instead hid the diaries and his notes on the code in what would have been Anne's study and concealed the room behind a false wall. This false wall was discovered when the property was purchased by the town of Halifax, and in the years following, parts of Lister's extraordinary collection were finally published. From these partial transcripts came the picture of Anne Lister-a cunning, educated businesswoman whose journal entries and surviving collection of letters range from the poetic to the painstakingly practical-and this picture has fascinated scholars and the public ever since, inspiring reexaminations of literature from the time8, the production of a film, and an ongoing HBO series.9 Within all of these representations and reexaminations of Lister's life, her survival as a queer woman is highlighted, be it in her search for romantic partnership or wielding of power in Halifax. An inescapable aspect of her survival in all of its forms, however, is Lister's use of her gentlemanly persona. As Ula Klein has argued, female crossdressers were central figures who taught readers to recognize "the realistic, pleasurable, and serious possibility of female same-sex desires that are not apparitional but, rather, tangible, visible, and embodied." (2) Though Anne Lister's intent in adopting her Byronic gentlemanly identity will likely never be known for certain, she remains emblematic of how queer women have struggled for recognition throughout history, and as someone very aware of her lack of community, she knew she had to align herself with a respectable yet recognizable public figure, one she found in Byron. By mirroring a public identity that combined the queer with the gentleman, the socialite with the outcast, the masculine with the feminine, Lister created a persona that was easily recognized within her own time and has echoed through history as a symbol of queer survival. She refused to be erased and in doing so was able to finally define herself not just as a Byronic woman, or a landowner, or even a lesbian, but as an amalgamation of identities that, when combined, create the figure known as Gentleman Jack, Lady of Shibden Hall.

Sidebar

Recommended Citation

Olivieri, Michelina (2021) "Visions: "Which made it look like a gentleman's": Anne Lister's Use of Lord Byron in Her Construction of a Gentlemanly Image," ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830: Vol.11: Iss.2, Article 2.

http://doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.11.2.1282.

Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol11/iss2/2

Footnote

1 Patricia Hughes has also independently published a portion of Lister's diaries. However, her collection, The Early Life of Miss Anne Lister and the Curious Tale of Miss Eliza Raine (2015), is focused on Lister's first known relationship with her schoolmate, Eliza Raine, and is comprised of only a select few diary entries alongside a wider collection of letters and other historical documents that explore the relationship.

2 Italics are used in transcriptions of Lister's diaries to indicate when she is writing in code, and the practice is continued throughout this article unless otherwise specified.

3 For more information on Lister's formation of a lesbian identity, see Orr 203 -213, Rowanchild, ""My Mind on Paper"" 199-207, and Rowanchild, "Skirting the Margins" 145-157. Additionally, Lister's two major biographies by Steidele and Choma and Wainwright both center around her relationships with women and how she navigated them. Steidele organizes her chapters by Lister's major relationships and Choma and Wainwright focus primarily on Lister's courting of and marriage to Ann Walker. These autobiographies are emblematic of Lister's primary distinction as a historical lesbian.

4 For more on Byron's queer interpretations, see George, "Reification and the Dandy" and Jackson, "Least Like Saints."

5 Italics from original text.

6 Jen Manion excludes Lister from this term in Female Husbands: A Trans History because she so explicitly says that she is a woman who loves women and performs her masculinity for specific purposes like social influence rather than as gender expression (9).

7 Lister created the code with her classmate and lover, Eliza Raine, as a means to communicate in secret before Lister left the school. The code, which consists of Greek, algebraic, and original symbols, includes a full alphabet as well as a collection of shorthand symbols for common words. The romance between the girls was discovered by the school, though whether it was the reason for Lister's departure or her family's lack of funds for her tuition is unclear.

8 The literature of the Bronte sisters, specifically that of Emily Bronte, have been of particular interest where Lister is concerned as there is evidence that the Brontes were at least aware of Lister. See Berg; Emberson and Emberson; Hughes, "Was Eliza Raine the Real Mrs Rochester?"; Kennard; Liddington, "Anne Lister and Emily Bronte"; Longmuir; and Simon Marsden, "Imagination, Materiality and the Act of Writing in Emily Bronte's Diary Papers."

9 The series, Gentleman Jack, has a second season currently in production.

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