Books by Helena Whitbread

These diaries cover Anne Lister’s life from 1816-1824.

These remarkable diaries are a piece of lost lesbian history. Anne Lister defied the role of womanhood seen in the novels of Jane Austen: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller – and lesbian. She kept extensive diaries, written partly in code, of her life and loves. The diaries have been edited by Helena Whitbread, who spent years decoding and transcribing them.

These diaries cover Anne Lister’s life from 1824-1826.

This journal starts with Anne’s trip to Paris. It is through her amazingly frank and detailed journals that we are able to enter into her adventurous life. The chronicling of her passionate affairs with other women would have startled her contemporaries. “I love and only love the fairer sex,” she wrote. The explicit accounts of Anne’s sexual contacts have a power to shock that has not diminished.

In the form of a Q&A, this book compares and contrasts the diaries and lives of 19th century lesbian diarist Anne Lister and modern-day lesbian diarist Natasha Holme.

Like Anne Lister two hundred years before her, Natasha wrote her diaries in a secret code, based on the Greek alphabet. The book contains photographs of Anne’s and Natasha’s encoded diaries. It is divided into sections such as …

• Early sexuality
• The mentality behind keeping a detailed diary
• Encoding
• Obsessiveness
• Christianity

“When I first heard that you have been keeping a diary from a young age and, furthermore, that you had used an esoteric code, I was immediately interested. I was further intrigued by the fact that you are a lesbian and wrote about your sexual life. It seemed to me that a modern parallel could be drawn with Anne Lister, the early 19th century lesbian diarist who had written a great deal about her lesbian sexuality in her journals, couched in a secret code of her own devising. I thought it would be interesting to see how far this hypothesis could be taken and wondered if you would be willing to join me in an exploration of the similarities and differences, as diarists and as lesbians, between yourself and a woman who lived some two hundred years before your time.”

Helena Whitbread

Also by Natasha Holme:

• Lesbian Crushes at School: A Diary on Growing Up Gay in the Eighties
• Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia: A Diary on How I Acquired my Eating Disorder
• Lesbian Crushes in France: A Diary on Screwing Up my Year Abroad