There are certain days in a person’s life which can mark a change so dramatic that life is never quite the same again. Such a change happened to me in 1983, the day I walked into the archive department of the library in my home town of Halifax, in West Yorkshire.
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The mid-life impulse which led me to invest years in college and university was based, not only on a desire to complete my education (if it can be said that one’s education is ever completed!) but also a long-held desire to become a writer. The challenge was to discover which genre would provide the most fulfilment of this ambition.
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The Christmas of 1824 finds Anne, along with her maid Elizabeth Wilkes Cordingley, in Paris. They were staying at a modest guest house or pension at 24, Place Vendome. The proprietors were a M. & Mme de Boyve. Anne’s journal entry for Christmas day illustrates the difficulties of something which we all take for granted–that of taking a bath.
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It is not often that a TV star asks to spend a day with you in your own home, but that is what happened to me once the BBC had decided to make a film from the book of extracts which I had edited from the journals of Anne Lister.
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I am thrilled to be able to say that Sally Wainwright, brilliant writer and BAFTA winner of hugely acclaimed TV series such as Happy Valley and the Bronte drama To Walk Invisible, has at last achieved her ambition to write an epic series about Anne Lister to be entitled Shibden Hall. Filming is to begin nest year.
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One of the hottest topics of the day in the gay community is that of same-sex marriages. Almost two hundred years earlier Anne Lister, in the two serious relationships of her adult years, firstly with Mariana Lawton and then with Ann Walker, tried to emulate, so far as was possible, the rituals performed in the heterosexual world.
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What would two women, separated by two hundred years, both writing their diaries in a secret code, have in common?
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Christmas night, 1810, found Anne writing a wistful letter to her new love, Isabella Norcliffe, in which she imagines her lover dancing the night away at the Assembly Rooms in York.
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Was Anne Lister unique as the only lesbian who kept a diary in code so that she could talk freely about her love-affairs with women? In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I was convinced that she was.
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Anne was aware of the impression her masculinity or her ‘oddity’, as she called it, made upon people. Usually she was able to rise above the vulgar taunts of the rougher elements in the town.
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I have just returned from a holiday in the seaside town of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, with my sister and daughter.
Scarborough featured quite prominently at certain stages in Anne Lister’s life. A chapter in my forthcoming biography of Anne Lister concentrates on the time she spent there with her lover, Mariana Lawton.
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In the long task of writing the life of Anne Lister, the same dilemma has dogged me almost from the beginning of my odyssey some ten years ago.
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Blog
Shelf Portrait – what would yours be?
As a librarian I love books. So, no-one would be surprised that I have a lot of books nor that I might want to have pictures of books on my walls.
In 2018 I picked up a flyer for the Hebden Bridge Open Studio weekend, an event for any artist in the Upper Calder Valley to showcase their work. A picture of a bookshelf caught my eye, it was one of Roo Waterhouse’s wonderful Shelf Portraits at Northlight Studio in Hebden. I had to have one!
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