A violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before. — Anne Lister (image via Calderdale Museum) Her neighbors in 19th century Yorkshire saw Anne as they would see any other noblewoman: a bit peculiar perhaps — never marrying and dressing in all-black — but otherwise normal, buying land to extend her family's vast estate and traveling throughout England. And Anne's diary that she kept that time would be normal, too, except for pages and pages of encoded script — a part-algebra, part-Greek cipher that rendered more than 40 years of writing almost illegible. In the 1980s, historian Dorothy Thompson took it upon herself to research all 4 million words in Anne's diary. Her research team pieced together bits of Anne's life, looking for the dangerous secret that would have compelled the Yorkshire lady to hide so much of her life.
A Woman to Know: Anne Lister
A Woman to Know: Anne Lister
A Woman to Know: Anne Lister
A violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before. — Anne Lister (image via Calderdale Museum) Her neighbors in 19th century Yorkshire saw Anne as they would see any other noblewoman: a bit peculiar perhaps — never marrying and dressing in all-black — but otherwise normal, buying land to extend her family's vast estate and traveling throughout England. And Anne's diary that she kept that time would be normal, too, except for pages and pages of encoded script — a part-algebra, part-Greek cipher that rendered more than 40 years of writing almost illegible. In the 1980s, historian Dorothy Thompson took it upon herself to research all 4 million words in Anne's diary. Her research team pieced together bits of Anne's life, looking for the dangerous secret that would have compelled the Yorkshire lady to hide so much of her life.