Anne Lister's first love: Learned by Heart

Cover of Emma Donoghue's Learned by Heart. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023. Image source: BookPage

Anne Lister, a member of a landowning family in Yorkshire, was born in 1791 and died in 1840. She is known to history because she kept a diary, ultimately totalling 4 million words, that described her daily life. (For comparison's sake, four million words is roughly the combined length of Charles Dickens' 15 novels.)

'"I propose from this day to keep an exact journal of my actions and studies, both to assist my memory and to accustom me to set a due value on my time." Introduction to Mr. Gibbon's Journal. A. Lister.' Inscription to Anne Lister's diary preceding the entry for Friday 21 March 1817. Image source: West Yorkshire Archive Service

A substantial portion of the diary was written in a secret "crypt hand"; when decoded, these sections were discovered to detail her sexual relationships with the women in her Yorkshire social circle, as well as connections she'd made when travelling. Her diary has become a key document of 19th-century same-sex relationships. The story of the discovery of the hidden diary by a male relative nearly five decades after Anne's death, its decoding, and how it came into the possession of Halifax town library is told in the first post of my series on Anne Lister, "I only love the fairer sex." The diary is now held at the West Yorkshire Archive Service in Calderdale.

Anne Lister has been the subject of several nonfiction books and an excellent (though not entirely history-based) TV series, Gentleman Jack, starring Suranne Jones as Anne. Thanks to funding from Sally Wainwright, the writer and producer of Gentleman Jack, Anne Lister's diaries have been digitized, transcribed and decoded by an army of online volunteers.

Anne started keeping her diary in 1806. One of its motivations seems to have been to record her correspondence with her former schoolmate Eliza Raine. Between 1806 and 1810 Anne noted receiving more than 130 letters from Eliza, and 82 survive, along with Eliza's diary from 1809 to 1810.

"Sunday Feb[rua]ry – 1st [1807] – Wrote to ER [Eliza Raine] –
Tuesday – 3d – Had a Letter from ER
Sunday – 8th – Wrote to ER –
Monday 9th – Went again to Mr K[night, Anne's tutor] after having
Holidays since December Saturday 27th –
Tuesday Febry – 10th – Had a Letter from ER –"
Excerpt from Anne Lister's diary. Image source: West Yorkshire Archive Service

Eliza had been Anne's roommate at the Manor House School in York, a boarding school for the daughters of well-to-do Yorkshire families. Anne had been sent there from her parents' home in Market Weighton in 1805 at age 14. The school occupied King's Manor, originally built in the 13th century to house the abbots of St. Mary's Abbey. The abbey was suppressed and largely destroyed by King Henry VIII in 1539, but the Manor largely survived the destruction and was renovated during Elizabeth I's reign. In the first decades of the 1600s it hosted the Stuart monarchs James I and later his son Charles I when they travelled north to Scotland, and later was the residence of the Governor of York. But after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 it was leased out to a series of tenants until the Manor School took possession in the late 1700s. It is still standing, and is now part of the University of York.

King's Manor, University of York. Image credit: Emma Donoghue. Image source: Pan Macmillan

At Manor School Anne was assigned to an attic room, "The Slope," which she shared with 14-year-old Eliza. Eliza had been born in the British settlement of Madras (now Chennai), India, and was the daughter of East India Company surgeon William Raine and his Indian common-law wife. A 6-year-old Eliza and her elder sister Jane had accompanied Raine's surgeon colleague William Duffin and his (English) wife as their wards when the Duffins left India to return to York. William Raine died as he was travelling to back to England in 1800; it is not known what happened to their mother.

As is suggested by their attic room—attics were where servants were lodged—both young women must have been seen as outsiders. Eliza's mixed-race parentage would have set her apart, as would Anne's lack of conformity to conventional standards of feminine dress and demeanor. (As an adult she would regularly wear a black greatcoat and boots, would regularly walk long distances, travelled widely, and inherited and ran a family estate; she has been described as "gender non-conforming.")

But if their attic room separated them from the rest of their schoolmates at night, it also drew them together and gave them privacy. They fell in love and began a passionate sexual relationship, likely to have been the first for both of them.

"With this di[a]mond I cut this glass / With this face I kissed a lass." Graffito on a window in the Huntingdon Room in the King's Manor. Image credit: Emma Donoghue. Image source: Pan Macmillan

Although Anne left the school in 1806 while Eliza remained, they continued as a couple for another five years or so, sustaining their connection through frequent correspondence and visits. In Eliza's diary and letters, which used the same code as Anne's, Eliza referred to Anne as her husband. Anne later said that the two had planned to live together as life companions when they both came of age. But in 1810 at age 19 Anne began a relationship with 25-year-old Isabella Norcliffe, the eldest daughter of a family Anne had met through Eliza's guardians, the Duffins. This new relationship clearly distressed Eliza; in her own diary she recorded arguments with Anne during a visit in 1810 that "left me e[x]ceedingly ill."

"How can I refuse my darling husband's solicitude to hear the events of Isabella's visit? Nothing glaringly strange took place my love but what happened may amuse and please you as it may illustrate most clearly the near resemblance that dear creature has arrived at [?] to you." Transcription of a coded letter to Anne Lister from Eliza Raine in Anne Lister's diary, date unknown. Image source: West Yorkshire Archive Service

Eliza's unhappiness was only increased when in 1814 Anne pledged life companionship with another woman, Mariana Belcombe, whom she had met through Isabella. Around this time Eliza was committed to an asylum in York run by Dr. William Belcombe, Mariana's father. As I wrote in "It was all nature: Anne Lister, part 2," "It's not clear to what extent suspicions of Eliza's sexuality figured in her diagnosis, but women who were considered sexually disordered, emotionally unstable, or simply inconvenient could be diagnosed with 'hysteria' or 'lunacy' and confined." And, of course, Eliza's "black blood" (as described by Duffin's stepdaughter Mary Jane Marsh) may have been seen as giving her a propensity for "wildness." Eliza would remain institutionalized until her death 45 years later.

Emma Donoghue's Learned by Heart (2023) is a fictionalization of Anne and Eliza's real-life first love, from the point of view of Eliza. The first sentence of Learned by Heart is "My dear Lister, Last night I went to the Manor House again." The echo of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca—"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again"—is entirely intentional. Like Rebecca's unnamed narrator, Eliza returns to the site of her first love only in her imagination. By 1815, when this letter is written, Eliza is confined in Dr. Belcombe's asylum. [1]

Donoghue's novel fills in the largely blank historical record of Eliza and Anne's relationship with richly imagined incident. Some of its scenes are drawn from Anne's later diary. After their nightly sexual encounters begin,

A whole week passes before they broach the subject. (Eliza's been afraid to break the spell by speaking—burst the bubble of their bliss. And whenever they're alone together, it seems as if their lips are used most eloquently for kissing.) Finally, one mild afternoon, strolling along the Manor Shore and eyeing the pair of swans, she demands, "Who taught you?"

A half-laugh. "Nature, I suppose. Who taught you?" (219-220)

This dialogue is adapted from a passage in Anne's diary. The entry for Monday 8 October 1832 describes a day Anne spent with her neighbor Ann Walker kissing and "pressing" on Ann's sofa:

When dusk [fell] she asked (I had said I was at no time likely to marry—how far she understood me I could not quite make out), "If you never had any attachment who taught you to kiss?"

I laughed and said how nicely that was said, then answered that nature taught me. I could have replied, "And who taught you?"

Anne Lister's diary entry for Monday 8 October 1832 (excerpt). Image source: West Yorkshire Archive Service

Later in the novel, Anne and Eliza are in their room recovering from scarlet fever:

Lister goes on at length about a pair of Irish cousins she's read about in a magazine. Refusing to be married off or put in a convent, the ladies ran away together twenty-seven years ago, and have been sharing a cottage in Wales ever since.

Eliza's surprised to hear that they didn't get dragged back and locked up; instead, their escapade made them famous. (233)

This allusion to the Ladies of Llangollen is also derived from Anne's diary. Both Mariana Belcombe (in 1817, after her marriage to Charles Lawton) and Anne (in 1822) travelled to Wales and visited the home of the Ladies, Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler. In her diary entry of Tuesday 23 July 1822, Anne wrote: "I am interested about these 2 ladies very much. There is something in their story & in all I have heard about them here that, added to other circumstances, makes a deep impression. Sat musing on the sopha, wotting what to do, inconsolate & moody, thinking of M—. Low about her." By 1822 the Ladies had lived openly as a couple for more than four decades, and were a model of the kind of life to which Anne aspired, first with Eliza, then with Isabella, and finally with Mariana. By 1822, however, Anne had begun to despair of ever being able to realize her dream. [4]

Eliza and Anne's time together at the Manor School culminates in a ritual that sacralizes their love:

A sort of wedding, then? A private one, like Juliet and Romeo's. To make good on all that Lister and Eliza have said in the dark; to make their union right, and settled, in the eyes of heaven.

The next Saturday the two of them ask permission to take a walk on their own. They huddle on the porch of St. Olave's until they're quite sure it's empty. In they venture, down the nave that's so chilly all year round, with its grubby hangings. They kneel together in a pew, gripping each other's icy fingers. They're not wearing any special clothes, and of course there's no music, nor any minister or witnesses. But the church feels so old and holy, Eliza's almost sick with excitement.

What would Dr. Duffin think of her (not yet fifteen) taking such a solemn step as this marriage—vowing herself, for life, without his permission, without even his knowledge?. . .This is something beyond the reach of her guardian's comprehension. He'd call it playacting, absurd, sacrilegious. Little he knows. (254)

Their private ceremony echoes Anne's actions with at least two later lovers, Mariana Belcombe and Ann Walker. In her diary entry of Sunday 7 May 1826, Anne wrote,

We went to the old church. Got there just after the service had begun. . .Mariana & I staid the sacrament—the first time we ever received it together in our lives.

Taking communion together had deep symbolic meaning for Anne. With Ann Walker she exchanged rings, and three weeks later shared communion. From her diary entry of Sunday 30 March 1834:

At Goodramgate Church at 10 35/"; Miss W— and I and [Anne's servant] Thomas staid the sacrament. . .The first time I ever joined Miss W— in my prayers—I had prayed that our union might be happy. . .

Donoghue is very knowledgeable about Anne and her world, and that understanding infuses Learned by Heart. Perhaps she is almost too close to the material; in 2010 Donoghue published an article in The Guardian entitled "My hero: Anne Lister." [2] Unfortunately in a few instances she allows her characters to become over-explanatory, with the too-obvious purpose of conveying information to the reader rather than to each other. Some examples, mainly from the early part of the novel:

• Anne describing to her schoolmates her family's place in the social hierarchy of Yorkshire: "'Mine is the Halifax branch of the ancient county lineage. Shibden Hall's been in the family for two centuries—a timber-framed manor house, built five years after Agincourt,' she says fondly. 'The Listers were once the greatest landowners in the district.'" (20) Although Anne was inordinately proud of her family estate, this speech seems improbable coming from anyone but a modern-day Shibden Hall tour guide.
• Eliza asking about Anne's family, and Anne's response: "'Both your parents are still living, are they?' A nod. 'And two brothers, Sam and John, at school near Pickering. Also a sister of eight, Marian, a great annoyance. That makes four of us still standing, out of six—our first John was before my time,' Lister adds, 'and little Jeremy died when I was eleven, though I barely knew him, as he was put out to nurse ten miles away'" (35). Almost everyone in Anne's acquaintance would have had siblings who died in infancy or childhood; it seems unlikely that in introducing herself Anne would go into such detail about brothers now deceased that she had never or hardly known. [3]
• Eliza talking to Anne about her father, William Raine: "'My father was a prisoner for four years, in India'. . .'Four years!' Lister marvels. 'Which war was this?'. . .'Our Company's, against Mysore, a southern kingdom whose ruler was in league with the French.' 'The East India Company, this is?' 'Those of us born into it simply call it the Company. The most powerful firm the world's ever known,' Eliza boasts, 'with its own coinage and taxes.' According to Dr. Duffin, the Company's composed of two hundred clerks in a small office in London, backed by a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers abroad: We hold two-thirds of India already, and rule her better than her princelings ever have. But she's meant to be telling the story of Father's captivity" (84–85). Which she goes on to do, at a level of historical, military, and gruesome physical detail that it seems unlikely would have been conveyed to a child by the adults around her. And could anyone approaching adulthood in Britain while belonging to Anne's social class need an explanation of the East India Company?

There's also the occasional dash of orientalism. Here's Eliza recalling memories of her home in India:

• "Walls flecked in places with red from spat paan, and the warm scent of joss sticks. In her mind's eye she conjures the shimmer of lacquered brass lamps. Low hum of conversation and snores at night, tom-toms in the distance." (28) This sounds like a description taken from the screenplay of Black Narcissus rather than the memories of a young child growing up in an English doctor's house in India during the British Raj (walls flecked with spat paan?). Despite his taking an Indian wife, William Raine seems hardly to have been a "White Mughal"; he was returning to England when he died.

But these are rare instances of clunkiness in Learned by Heart, which in the main succeeds admirably in creating a credible and engaging picture of the young Anne Lister and Eliza Raine; the confusing, overwhelming and thrilling sensations of first love and first sex; and the pain of learning that life and love rarely conform to our passionate wishes and ideals.

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1. No letters from Eliza to Anne after 1814 have survived; Eliza's letters in Learned by Heart are Donoghue's convincing inventions.
2. Women's history scholar Jill Liddington writes that "Many readers—coming to the Anne Lister writings hoping for a heroine, an empowerer of other women, an inspirational feminist icon—will be disappointed." See "No historical interest whatever: Anne Lister, part 6"
3. By 1815, when the novel ends, Anne's real-life brothers had both died, and she (rather her still-living father) became the heiress of Shibden Hall.
4. A dozen years later Anne would finally manage to have her lover Ann Walker move in with her at Shibden Hall. Although the couple had to face both the fierce opposition of Ann's relatives and Ann's own deep feelings of sexual guilt, they lived together at Shibden for five years, until their extended trip to Russia that resulted in Anne's death. For more, see "Captain Tom: Anne Lister, part 5"