The best-kept secret

In the winter of 1820–1 a 29-year old woman named Anne Lister went to stay with some female friends who lived nearby. This was a visit between gentry families of the sort that Jane Austen describes in her novels. But there the resemblance ends. By the end of her stay Anne had flirted with four women and gone to bed with three of them. She then wrote a letter to another woman, swearing undying love.

We know about Lister’s sex life from the lengthy daily diaries that she kept. She devised a clever code in which she described her sexual encounters in remorseless detail. The German writer Angela Steidele has used the diaries to construct a life of Anne Lister, and a fascinating story it is too.

Lister came from an old Yorkshire family and she lived near Halifax in a house called Shibden Hall. She was ‘odd’. Dressed in women’s clothes of unfashionable black, she had a downy upper lip, wore a locket containing pubic hair and spoke in a low voice. She described herself as a gentleman, and she was mobbed in the street for being a man. People called her ‘Gentleman Jack’.

A compulsive and accomplished flirt, she was an expert seducer. What is surprising is how few of the women she courted refused her advances. Trapped in marriages to dull or brutal husbands, or condemned to lives of enforced spinsterhood, they threw themselves lustfully into Anne’s arms. In a society obsessed with virginity, girls were encouraged to share beds as a protection against marauding males. Little did their parents know what Anne was up to. Complacent husbands accepted Anne’s friendship with their wives and asked no questions about what went on when the two women were in bed together.