Jill Liddington and Alison Oram Joint lecture - Decoding Anne Lister: the diaries of Anne LIster of Shibden Hall 1791-1840
Date: 22 June 2010, 17:30h
Location: Yorkshire Bank Lecture Theatre – Leeds University Business School
Professor Alison Oram, Professor in Social & Cultural History, Leeds Metropolitan University
Dr Jill Liddington, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds
This lecture follows a drama to be shown on BBC2 at 9.00pm on Bank Holiday Monday 31 May 2010. The drama is called The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister and is immediately followed by a documentary - revealing Anne Lister. For more information on both of these programmes please click here. This takes you to the BBC2 schedule for the day and more information can be found by clicking on the programme.
Abstract: This joint lecture explores the world of Anne Lister (1791-1840) and her home, Shibden Hall near Halifax. She inherited the estate from her uncle in 1826, and it is now run as a local authority museum and park.
Anne Lister is best remembered as a lesbian diarist. Her journals (1806-1840) run to an extraordinary four million words – about three times the length of Samuel Pepys’s diaries. About one-sixth of these four million words are written in Anne’s private code – mainly recording her romantic and sexual affairs with other women.
In this lecture, Jill Liddington revisits the dramatic transmission story of how the diaries survived since Anne’s death in 1840 in the remote Caucasus Mountains, and how the secret code was eventually cracked. She discusses how Anne Lister ran her life in the 1830s once she came into power at Shibden, and analyzes her 1834 same-sex partnership ceremonies with Ann Walker, a neighbouring heiress.
Alison Oram considers the impact the decoding of the Anne Lister diaries had on lesbian history-writing and on lesbian communities. She then takes us inside Shibden Hall, to see how museum curators present lesbian sexuality in the setting of a historic house, and comments on the changing politics of sexuality and diversity in public history.