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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During a visit to York, Anne Lister’s friend and ex-lover, Isabella Norcliffe, accused Anne, half-jokingly, of being a “tuft-hunter.”
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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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Christmas in Paris with Anne Lister
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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