Female Fortune: The Anne Lister Diaries, 1833–36: Land, gender and authority

by Jill Liddington

‘A unique and thrilling insight into the brilliant mind of Anne Lister’
Sally Wainwright, creator of Gentleman Jack

Female Fortune is the book which inspired Sally Wainwright to write Gentleman Jack, now a major drama series for the BBC and HBO.

Lesbian landowner Anne Lister inherited Shibden Hall in 1826. She was an impressive scholar, fearless traveller and successful businesswoman, even developing her own coalmines. Her extraordinary diaries, running to 4-5 million words, were partly written in her own secret code and recorded her love affairs with startling candour. The diaries were included on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011.

Jill Liddington’s classic edition of the diaries tells the story of how Anne Lister wooed and seduced neighbouring heiress Ann Walker, who moved in to live with Anne and her family in 1834. Politically active, Anne Lister door-stepped her tenants at the 1835 Election to vote Tory. And socially very ambitious, she employed architects to redesign both the Hall and the estate.

Yet Ann Walker had an inconvenient number of local relatives, suspicious of exactly how Anne Lister could pay for all her grand improvements. Tensions grew to a melodramatic crescendo when news reached Shibden of the pair being burnt in effigy.

This 2022 edition includes a fascinating Afterword on the recent discovery of Ann Walker’s own diary. Female Fortune is essential reading for those who watched Gentleman Jack and want to know more about the extraordinary woman that was Anne Lister.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Queer, Biography, LGBT, Feminism, Lesbian

306 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1998

About the author

Jill Liddington (born in Manchester, 1946) is a British writer and academic who specialises in women's history.
She joined the Department of External Studies at Leeds University in 1982 and became a Reader in Gender History, School of Continuing Education, until her transfer to CIGS, where she is currently Honorary Research Fellow.
Liddington stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Sowerby Bridge ward in the Calderdale Council election, 2004 - largely to prevent more BNP councillors being elected.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[K. A. MacKinnon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been my favourite of the Anne Lister books I’ve read so far. It does a great job of putting both her and her diary extracts in context. And it also edits her diary extracts of much of the tedious detail she tended to include. Many of the entries were reduced to merely a handful of lines, and days or weeks were skipped entirely. Having read Helena Whitbread’s book first, though, I didn’t worry too much about what I was missing.

Another advantage Female Fortune has over the other books I have read so far is simply that it focuses on a more interesting section of Anne Lister’s life. She has found the woman she wants to spend her life with, she has received her inheritance, so she is able to be active and pursue goals for herself and her property. In Helena Whitbread’s book, set in an earlier part of Anne’s life, she felt stuck a lot of the time, worried about money and longing for both love and independence, which could get a little tedious.

I also liked the focus this book took when wading through the abundance of source material: “This book disentangles Anne’s intimacy with Ann Walker and her strategy for exploiting Shibden’s economic potential; it measures how effectively friends, neighbours and relatives in Halifax were able to signal their displeasure at this unorthodox relationship and its inheritance implications.” Not just Anne Lister but the glimpses her diaries provide of the world around her and how people reacted to her and her unusual lifestyle. I found this an excellent way into the material.

Also, for fans of the television series Gentleman Jack, this pretty much picks up where season one leaves off.

[Laianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to love this book as much as I did the Helena Whitbread volumes but I was put off by both the content of Female Fortune and Jill Liddington’s editorial choices. Pay close attention to the subtitle: Land, Gender, and Authority. Unlike other excerpts of Anne’s diaries, which primarily focus on her social climbing and romantic entanglements, this book dwells on the tedium of her day-to-day business ventures against the backdrop of her unfulfilling “marriage” with Ann Walker (I’ll be happy to never read the words “no kiss” again). While I understand Ms. Liddington’s inclination to explore the excesses and limits of Anne’s class privilege, I wish she’d taken opportunities to balance political and financial ambitions with Anne’s trademark ruminations on romantic and sexual fulfillment. For example, I would have loved to read Anne’s full correspondence with former flames like Marianna and Vere, which are not only glossed over, but left unexamined. In further contrast to Helena Whitbread, who limits her commentary to explanations of difficult-to-read text, Ms. Liddington summarizes what she chooses to omit, leading me to wonder if those neglected portions are more interesting than what is on the page. If you are excited by small town politics and property management in 1830s Halifax and York, this may be the book for you. But for readers interested in Anne’s affairs of the heart, I’d recommend the Helena Whitbread volumes. The Gentleman Jack series on HBO covers the tenant and coal drama in a more palatable way than this book, and Anne’s occasional romantic liaisons with Ann Walker are best summarized in her own words: “she not well enough for much moving about... played gently tho’ not excitingly.”

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only for Anne Lister obsessive. I wish Liddington had reinforcedher thesis of the intersection of public life, property and sexuality throughout the diary excerpts, rather than letting those stand alone and presenting her analysis before and after. My other quibble is she clearly intended the work to give Ann Walker her due, but she didn’t even acknowledge her clearly active interest in Anne Lister’s seduction of her. Even when the text of the diary indicates her sexual initiative, Liddington ignores it. It wouldn’t have undermined her thesis of dynastic inheritance between the two women, so why deemphasize it?

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fascinating book. I’m obsessed with Gentleman Jack and I found it so interesting to discover the real history, and see just how in depth the research for the show was. I got so excited every time I found a line in the diary entries that made into the show. The book also highlighted just how important the show is for bringing Ann Walker into the spotlight

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keep in mind, if you read any overview of AL's diaries, you're getting a heavily edited version because it was just A WHOLE LOT of words. I found it fascinating, especially the distinctions between the coded and non-coded parts, but knocked off a star because of what info was selectively left out (like, we *know* what happened when AL went to the Lawton's on Xmas, c'mon now). However, after reading enough to be pretty convinced AL was a bit of a jerk, the author does an excellent job putting that potential conclusion in perspective and adjusting the lens: yes, she may have been, but mostly by our (21st century) standards.

If you're here for the "tea", just be aware that you have to get through a lot of entries about coal and workmen and Tory politics.

[☠Arianne Reads Horror ☠ · Rating 4 out of 5]

After watching 'Gentleman Jack' I found myself increasingly interested in Anne Lister. Not only as a figure for learning more about lesbian relationships of that time, but also how her marriage to Ann Walker was very similar to a 'conventional' marriage of the time. By this I mean Anne Lister acted somewhat similarly to the males back then , who were invested in being able to have financial help from their partner whenever they needed.

This book describes very well through Anne Listers writings how she went about ensuring she had some access to Ann Walkers money to be able to build her Shibden estate and live as she thought she should.

While many of the books focus heavily on the romance between Anne and Ann, this book shows us how Anne Lister treated Ann walker, sometimes in a manipulative manner to get what she wanted.

A very informative book that helps us to learn more of the financial and political views and opinions of Anne Lister

[Valerie Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

After watching "Gentleman Jack" (not being picked up for a 3rd season, darn) I wanted to learn more about Anne Lister and how accurate the program was. It was fairly accurate, I was happy to see. After a while I found Lister's diary entries to be tedious and ended up mostly reading Liddington's comments with an occasional dive into the entries. However, to have challenged such strong public ethos of heterosexuality and marginalized women, what a strong person she was!

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know more about Anne Lister at the time of the HBO show, this is a good publication of the relevant diaries 1833-1836 along with history and context. There are a few different books of Anne Lister diary entries, and this one has illustrations, background, and edits out the boring parts. It also starts with Anne's relationship with Ann Walker and her coal dealings. For comparison, I read The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister to learn more about Anne's relationship with M Belcombe, and there was very little beyond love affairs in 1816-1824.

[Golda P · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and incredible book. It’s a must read for students of women’s history, queer history, legal history, English political history and so on. It’s a wonderful mix of the primary source of a small part of Anne Lister’s diaries, with helpful historical context from Jill Liddington. I highly recommend the book and the HBO series, “Gentleman Jack.”

[Janneke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting read. Helps paint a picture of the era Anne Lister lived in. Jill Liddington gives her views on how Anne Lister managed to live and act in her time.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super slow reading on this one. Very interesting details on the final years of Anne Lister's life.

[Micki Olivieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably a much better publication of Lister's journals than the popular Whitbread version.

[Mens Rea · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Vicky "phenkos" · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that inspired Sally Wainwright to create the fabulously successful BBC/HBO Gentleman Jack series. It's the book that Wainwright said she would take with her if she was headed for a desert island (Desert Island Discs). It comes from feminst historian Jill Liddington who has written on a range of feminist subjects including the suffragettes and Greenham Common. As the title suggests, it covers Anne Lister's trajectory from 1833 when she comes back from Copenhagen (viewers of the series will know that this roughly the end of Season 1) to 1836 when Anne's father, Jeremy Lister, dies and the two lovers -Anne Lister and Ann Walker- make plans to alter their wills in favour of each other.

If you've watched the series, should you also read the book? That depends on whether you have a historical interest in Anne Lister. The book differs from other offerings (Whitbread's publication of Anne Lister's diaries and Choma's Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister) in two important respects; in contrast to Whitbread's offerings which reproduce Anne's diaries including the passages in secret code, Liddington's book combines edited excerpts from the diaries with her own commentary, thus making a for a more comfortable reading experience. It also differs from Choma's book in giving more space to Anne Lister's voice and covering a slightly different period (it starts at a later point in time but also covers Captain Lister's death).

I particularly liked the Afterword, which I think is worth reading for its own sake. There Jill Liddington discusses the many contradictions present in Anne Lister's life and character, such as, for example, Anne Lister's Tory politics and her exploitation of young boys who worked in her coal mines. Liddington provides an admirably balanced view of Anne Lister's failings; never eulogising or glossing over the more unsavory aspects of her heroine, Liddington puts Anne Lister in perspective. It's clear that though a pioneering lesbian, Anne Lister had no interest in women's rights. She was not a feminist in the modern sense of the term. 'Many readers - coming to the Anne Lister diaries hoping for a heroine, an empowerer of other women, an inspirational feminist icon- will be disappointed', writes Jill Liddington. But when we return her to her pre-Victorial context, how do we make sense of her? How do we assess her conduct - as a business woman, as a political operator and as a "husband"?'

Liddington spends the next few pages offering such an assessment of Anne Lister - a well-thought out, balanced and cool-headed assessment. Crucially, she also adds a section on Ann Walker on whom posterity has been particualrly cruel, partly because of Ann Walker's mental health challenges but also because her presence in Anne Lister's life was inconvenient from the point of view of a historiography that would want to erase the latter's lesbianism. Putting the relationship of the two women in context, Liddington comments on the absence of a 'respectable public language for lesbianism'. So in a sense, it might have been easier for the two women to be 'husband' and 'wife' in the 1830s than it would be a century later, for example, when there was more public awareness of lesbianism and Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness was banned. This is not to belittle Anne Lister's achievement. Those who have seen season 1 will remember Mariana, Anne Lister's lover from her youth, telling her to marry a man in order to gain respectability, no matter who she shared her bed with. To Lister's protests that she will only marry someone she loves Mariana answers that if she found a woman who agreed to spend her life with her, that would have to be a very particular person; but 'I'm worried, Fred, that this person just doesn't exist'.

Jill Liddington has recently published another book on Anne Lister called As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836–38 taking up the story from 1836 to 1838. I plan to get hold of a copy and will update you when I read it.

Edit: A discovery! I found Ann Walker's diaries! They are here , side-byside with Anne Lister's diaries. I feel exhilarated!

[Sanneelshof · Rating 5 out of 5]

realy like to read about Anne Lister and after the 3th book still want to read more i dont want to wright spoilers so i don't just read the book

[Giuliana Poma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything about Anne Lister is fascinating and this book is not the exception. I loved it.

[Grace Demerath · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read. A little slow to start but what feels slow in the beginning is all very valuable information to help you better understand the diaries and Anne Lister as a person.