A Fellow of St Catharine’s has published the first edited collection of essays on the 19th-century diarist Anne Lister (1791–1840). Dr Caroline Gonda (1996), the College's Glen Cavaliero Fellow, and her colleague Chris Roulston have co-edited Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archives to ‘Gentleman Jack’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023) about Lister's five-million-word diaries, now recognised as a UNESCO world heritage document.
The Lister diaries are paradigm-shifting in their frank and explicit accounts of a nineteenth-century woman’s romantic and sexual relationships with other women, written in Lister’s personal code and constituting a significant portion of their content. As this collection shows, Lister’s diaries are also extraordinary in their range of material, from social commentary and politics to breath-taking travel accounts.
Dr Gonda, who is also the College’s LGBTQ+ Fellow and a Director of Studies in English, said:
“This is an exciting time to write about Lister’s diaries, with new scholarship emerging on so many areas of Lister’s life, and a flourishing community of academic and independent researchers. Chris and I first discussed the idea of this collection of essays four years ago, and Cambridge University Press was our first choice as a home for the book because of their recent publications on gender and sexuality. It is great that we can finally share what we have been working on for so long!”
Dr Caroline Gonda in her Anne Lister Society (ALS) t-shirt with a copy of Decoding Anne Lister
The collection of essays addresses the variety and interdisciplinarity of the diaries: Lister's negotiations with her own identity, her multiple same-sex relationships, her involvement in politics, her management of her home, Shibden Hall, and its estate, her adventurous travel and her lifelong thirst for knowledge – with her reading covering theology, anatomy, science, history, classical literature and philology, and modern languages. The volume also addresses Lister studies in popular culture through the successful Gentleman Jack BBC-HBO series, including an interview with its creator Sally Wainwright and a foreword by author Emma Donoghue, whose forthcoming novel Learned by Heart (Picador, 2023) explores Lister’s relationship with her first lover, Eliza Raine.
“It seemed entirely appropriate to end our collection with Sally Wainwright, and to begin it with Helena Whitbread, the scholar whose 1988 book on Lister’s diaries first revealed to the world what Lister’s code had kept secret. Originally driven by interest in Lister’s hometown of Halifax, Helena’s pioneering work has been vitally important to historians of sexuality and gender, literary scholars and others. It was a privilege to interview her for this book.
“Lister studies is a special field because it is not solely the preserve of academics – as anyone who has attended meetings of the Anne Lister Society (held in Halifax during Anne Lister Birthday Week in April) will tell you. Indeed, several of the essays in this book are based on presentations given at last year’s inaugural meeting of the ALS. Chris and I will be doing a session about our book this October at the Anne Lister Research Summit, an inclusive online conference for Anne Lister research enthusiasts. Many of the contributors to that conference have been involved in the West Yorkshire Archive Services project of transcribing Lister’s diaries in their entirety. This huge project needed a small army, assembled thanks to the popularity of Gentleman Jack and supported by Sally Wainwright’s Wellcome Trust grant which enabled the digitisation of the manuscripts. Transcripts of 12 of Lister’s 27 diary volumes are now available online, which makes all sorts of new research possible.”
Dr Gonda’s own essay in the collection on ‘Labels, Plaques and Identity Categories: Finding the Words for Anne Lister’ was inspired by the 2018 controversy over the wording of York Civic Trust’s rainbow plaque at Holy Trinity Church in York commemorating Lister’s union with her long-term partner, Ann Walker. The Trust subsequently agreed to change the wording on the plaque, which now describes Lister as a lesbian.
“Lister’s own relationship to labels and identity categories was a complicated and often resistant one: she saw herself as exceptional, but also wanted to find other women like herself, whether as models or as kindred spirits. My essay explores the stakes of these conversations about identity, and of trying to find the words to describe Lister, then and now.”
