About Anne Lister's diary 19 March – 3 April 1809

Introduction

Anne Lister, now seventeen years old, still lives with her immediate family (who the previous summer had moved to a modest house at Ellen Royd, near the centre of Halifax). We see her as an energetic girl, with a wide social circle: the Alexanders, the Bramleys, a Dr Disney. In this Austen-like world of visiting and tea-drinking, Anne emerges as an entertaining conversationalist, sometimes eccentrically dressed, and, although she might occasionally pretend otherwise, with no romantic interest in men. Rather, she enjoyed sharing their intellectual and sporting interests, even practising firing her father’s pistols. Meanwhile, she continued her studies with Mr Knight, reading Latin texts (eg Juvenal’s Satires, Lucian), and her music lessons with Mr Stopford, organist at Halifax Parish Church.

But Anne felt increasingly distanced from her unreliable parents and rather congested family house, preferring to spend time with her so-respectable Lister relatives. Uncle Joseph and his wife made her welcome at their elegant Northgate House, as did Uncle James and his two unmarried sisters, Anne and Martha, at ancient Shibden Hall perched up above the town.

Selected passage

By now the length of Anne’s daily entries in her diary has grown (though problems of illegibility remain eg 28 March). She continues writing intimate lines in her diary using the secret code (which she probably devised with Eliza Raine during a visit about six months earlier). Her correspondence with Eliza continues (though is not strongly represented here).

These two weeks have been selected because they give a rare glimpse of how Halifax perceived the public face of this unconventional young woman (eg Tuesday 21 March). And we also see the kind of adolescent scrapes Anne found herself in (on this occasion, with a Captain Bourne) by not observing the heterosexual proprieties – to the great anxiety of her conventionally-minded parents. In this seemingly Jane Austen adolescence, it is as if Lydia Bennet’s character developed a new turn. So her we get hints of the Anne Lister that was beginning to push the boundaries, as she approached her eighteenth birthday.

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