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Queer Heritage · Halifax, West Yorkshire

Shibden Hall (Anne Lister & Ann Walker)

Home of diarist Anne Lister, the 'first modern lesbian', who lived openly with Ann Walker; the pair considered themselves married after taking communion together in York in 1834. Lister's coded diaries are a UNESCO Memory of the World record.

StatusDocumented history
Daterelationship from 1832; lived together 1834–1840
The peopleAnne Lister ('Gentleman Jack'), Ann Walker
The siteShibden Hall, Lister Road, Halifax (Calderdale Museums)
Coordinates53.72400, -1.83700 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Anne Lister wrote roughly five million words of diary, about a sixth in a secret "crypt hand" of Greek letters and mathematical symbols she devised herself. Behind the code lay the most detailed record of a lesbian life in the English language: her lovers, her techniques and her own vocabulary for them — a "kiss" meant an orgasm, "grubbling" meant fingering, a cross in the margin marked masturbation. In plain hand she wrote the sentence that defines her: "I love & only love the fairer sex." A Halifax landowner in black who ran coal pits and was mocked as "Gentleman Jack", she climbed in the Pyrenees, loved Eliza Raine, Mariana Belcombe and finally the heiress Ann Walker, and died of a fever at Kutaisi in Georgia on 22 September 1840. The diaries survived because her descendant John Lister, having cracked the code with Arthur Burrell in the 1890s, was advised to burn them and instead hid them behind panelling at Shibden. They were rediscovered, transcribed from 1988 by the historian Helena Whitbread, and inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in 2011. Shibden Hall, the timber-framed house she loved and improved, is now a Calderdale museum; every page of the diaries has been digitised by the West Yorkshire Archive Service. She recorded her life so that it could not be erased, and very nearly was anyway.

More stories at this spot

The two-million-word enigma

For decades the diaries sat half-read. Arthur Burrell handed the code key to Halifax's librarian in the 1930s; researchers in the 1950s were made to submit extracts for approval, effectively censoring the sex. Only a 1984 Guardian feature and Helena Whitbread's arrival in the archive broke the silence — proof that suppression did not end with John Lister's panelling.

The venereal cross

Not every coded passage is about pleasure. Lister used the same crypt hand to record contracting a venereal infection from Mariana Lawton, who had it from her husband, and to track her own treatment — the boils, the mercury. The frankness that makes the diaries precious about desire makes them equally unflinching about its costs.

Embalmed home from Georgia

When Lister died of fever at Kutaisi in 1840, fourteen months into a vast tour of Russia and the Caucasus, Ann Walker had her body embalmed and shipped the entire way back to Halifax for burial. Walker's own later years were unhappy; she was removed from Shibden and declared of unsound mind, and only recently has her story been told in her own right.

Sources

Nearby on the map

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Legend

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