‘My Mind on Paper’: Anne Lister and the Construction of Lesbian Identity

Abstract

Anne Lister (1791–1840) of Shibden Hall near Halifax, kept a diary for 34 years. It eventually extended to over four million words, in 27 quarto volumes, about a sixth of which are in code. In this chapter I argue that Lister’s coded diary was an important tool in the construction of her sexual identity. By providing her with a safely enclosed textual space, it gave her the ability to assert a desire for women that offers a challenge both to the alleged absence of discourse on female homosexual experience and identity in the early part of the nineteenth century, and to the categorization of intimate relations between women of this period by the asexual term, ‘romantic friendship’. Lillian Faderman notes that the eighteenth-century fashion for romantic friendship ‘dictated that women may fall in love with each other, although they must not engage in genital sex’ (Faderman, 1981: 74). She concludes that ‘most love relationships between women during previous eras … were less physical than they are in our times’ (19). However, Lister’s explicit documentation of her sexual activity provides a refreshing alternative to what Terry Castle calls ‘the lugubrious myths of lesbian asexuality’ embodied by the idea of romantic friendship (Castle, 1993: 106). The conceptual possibility of physical relations between women has been problematized as much by the historical suppression of female sexuality in general, as by epistemological concerns; as Martha Vicinus warns, lesbian history consists largely of ‘nuances, masks, secrecy, and the unspoken’ (Vicinus, 1996: 235). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.