The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister (1806-40), about 7,722 pages long, record her life from age 15 to 49 in England in the early 1800s – a time and place best known through the made-up love stories of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
Lister wrote in two scripts:
- plainhand – her squiggly handwriting, full of abbrevs, usng up evy bit of papr.
- crypthand – her secret code (pictured above) made up of Greek letters, numbers and other symbols, with no punctuation or spaces. She wrote a sixth of her diaries in it.
Lister was a rich landowner in the north of England. When her younger brother died, Shibden Hall and its lands fell to her, complete with farms and coal mines. She never married or had children. She travelled and, not having been given a university education, studied Greek, Latin, French, mathematics, and history, read a ton of English literature, and kept up on the latest science. She stood with king, country, and church, did not see the justice in democracy, looked down on manufacturers, even those richer than her, and had a heart of stone for the poor.
In 1840 she was bitten by a tick while travelling in the Russian Empire and died.
In 1887 the last of her family to live at Shibden Hall, John Lister, had some of her plainhand entries of historical interest printed in the newspaper of the nearby town of Halifax in West Yorkshire. When he and Arthur Burrell, a schoolteacher and antiquarian, broke her code and read some of the crypthand, Burrell wanted to burn the diaries. Lister, the better antiquarian, hid the diaries in a wall of Shibden Hall.
In 1933 John Lister died broke. Shibden Hall passed to the Halifax town government along with her diaries. From Burrell they got the key to the code and locked it in a safe at the library.
In 1958 historian Dr Phyllis Ramsden got permission to work on the diaries complete with the key to the code. She said the crypthand parts were:
“excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind … and of no historical interest whatsoever.”
In 1988 what Anne Lister had written in crypthand was at long last made public, or (for those who have been paying attention) at least some of it. She wrote stuff like this:
January 29th 1821: “Burnt Mr Montagu’s farewell verses that no trace of any man’s admiration may remain. It is not meet for me. I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.”
May 31st 1824: “[my] disguised & hidden nature that suits not with the world … I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on the book & feel relieved.”
Filter bubble: It took over a hundred years and a sexual revolution (if not a gay rights movement) for that to get printed.
Filter within filter: And it took an Amazon recommendation hyped up, I later found out, by a television show on HBO, “Gentleman Jack” (2019- ), for me to find out even that. Ugh!
– Abagond, 2019, 2020.
Sources: mainly Google Images; “The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister” (2010) edited by Helena Whitbread.
See also:
- West Yorkshire Joint Services:
- images of all her diary pages and the key to her crypthand
- transcription project – only 5% of her diaries has a completed transcription as of 2020
- Belle
- filter bubble
- Reading old books
- The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
- The Thermometer Books of Amos Webber
- English country houses – like Shibden Hall
597
Ugh! What’s the point of this “excruciatingly tedious post” about a person of “no historical interest whatsoever.”?
LikeLike
LMAO!!! It is what it is. It did not turn out like I thought it would.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ gro jo
I loved the story of her diaries till I found out the diaries had been made into an HBO show. It was like someone had knocked my ice cream cone into the dirt.
LikeLike
Update: Found her complete diaries online, added an image and some links, corrected the number of pages (6,000 to 7,722) and made some slight edits.
LikeLike
@ Abagond
It’s ironic that the part of Lister’s diary which was deemed “of no historical interest whatsoever” is almost definitely the part of greatest historical value. We have very little documentation of lesbian lives from her era, much less firsthand accounts.
LikeLike
Abagond: You might enjoy the series Gentleman Jack about Ann Lister.
LikeLike