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.
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