Who was Anne Lister?

Anne Lister (1791 to 1840) was a Halifax landowner, industrialist and prolific diarist who lived at Shibden Hall for most of her life. Over the course of roughly three decades, she filled thousands of pages of diaries with detailed accounts of her business dealings, travels across Europe and personal life. A significant portion was written in a secret code combining Greek letters and mathematical symbols, a system she used partly to record her relationships with women at a time when doing so openly would have been dangerous.

Lister openly defied the conventions of her era, eventually entering into a long-term relationship with fellow landowner Ann Walker and effectively living as a married couple at Shibden Hall, decades before such relationships had any form of legal recognition. Local people of the time referred to her, not always kindly, as "Gentleman Jack", a nickname that later gave its name to Sally Wainwright's television adaptation of her life.

Lister's coded diaries remained largely unreadable until historian Helena Whitbread began transcribing them in the 1980s, work that eventually brought Lister's story to a much wider audience and paved the way for the TV series filmed in and around Halifax.