As Good as a Marriage

Anne Lister is a figure much written about, and her famous diaries run to over 4 million words, many of which are in a hard-to-read code. In this book, Jill Liddington continues the project she started with Female Fortune, guiding the reader through Anne Lister's writings from 1836-38.

After her 'marriage' to wealthy local heiress Ann Walker, the two lived together at Shibden. In 1836, with the deaths of Anne Lister's father and aunt (and the banishment of irksome sister Marian), Lister gained full control of Shibden Hall. Now at her most powerful, she wanted to fulfil her ambition to remodel herself and Shibden with appropriate grandeur. Defying gender norms of the time, and becoming an active entrepreneur, Lister developed Shibden's coal-mining potential and employed an impressive array of gardening and design experts (notably York architect John Harper). Under them laboured a small army of workmen, all working to reinvent traditional Shibden as something better fitting the heights of Anne Lister's social ambitions.

Suspicious Walker relatives might have seen this as a deviant household. But to Anne Lister it was nothing of the sort. Her remarkable self-confidence sprang from her ancient inherited acres, her identity as a traditional member of the landed gentry and her belief that God had determined her 'nature', to live life exactly as she did. Anne Lister's diaries dramatically challenge received notions of gender and female sexuality in early nineteenth-century England.