If the history of lesbianism has often been cast as one of invisibility and erasure,¹ then the history of lesbians using dictionaries could just as easily be described in terms of absence. In 1938, Virginia Woolf started writing a ‘Supplement to the Dictionary of the English Language’ and stopped after three entries. Her last definition was ‘A word for those who put living people into books’, but what that word should have been was left as a question mark.² When, in the 1970s, Judy Grahn began researching the etymologies of words for gay women and men, she ‘spent more than one evening in complete frustration sitting banging a dictionary against [her] knees screaming, “I know you’re in there!” after months of chasing the word bulldike’.³ Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig chose to redress the gaps in mainstream dictionaries by compiling their own lexicon, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1980, original French edition 1976), in which they imagine a forgotten lesbian past and a utopian lesbian future. However, as they note in their entry for dictionary itself, their work is ‘only a rough draft’, and its ‘arrangement could be called lacunary’.⁴ The most famous lacuna occurs at the entry for Sappho, which is a blank page.

Although absences like these may feel disheartening, I want to consider how they can also open up a space for creativity. Woolf’s question mark solicits an answer. When Grahn did not find a definition of bulldike, she wrote her own – ‘In slang, a strong, warriorlike Lesbian, assertive-looking Gay woman’ – and fancifully carried its origins back to the Iceni queen Boudica.⁵ The blank space Wittig and Zeig left under Sappho could be a testament to how little is known for certain about Sappho’s life, or it could be an invitation to the dictionary’s users to fill in what they imagine about the poet for themselves. And why not? After all, we routinely speak of ‘using’ a dictionary rather than simply ‘reading’ it. ‘Use’ is mutable and multifunctional. Using a dictionary might mean accepting what one finds in it, but it might also mean arguing with it, reinterpreting it, or even rewriting it to serve some alternative purpose.

In her own style, Anne Lister did all these things. Her interest in classical and modern languages made her a habitual user of dictionaries and grammars of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German and Russian, as well as English. When she was twelve, she asked her aunt to get her the best dictionary that her savings (five guineas) could buy.⁶ In her twenties, she compiled a short, private glossary of erotic and anatomical words she had gleaned from several reference works, starting with fuck and ending with tribas.⁷ When the library she built up at Shibden Hall was auctioned after her death in 1840, a partial catalogue of its contents included thirty-nine dictionaries, ranging from Johann Scapula’s Lexicon Graeco-Latinum to Pierre-Hubert Nysten’s Dictionnaire de médecine.⁸ It goes without saying that not all these titles (or terms) would have been expected to appear in a gentlewoman’s library (or in her vocabulary). Then again, Lister was never averse to what Sara Ahmed has called ‘queer uses’. Queer in this context refers not only to uses that are sexually subversive, but to any occasions when ‘things [are] used in ways other than for which they were intended or by those other than for whom they were intended’. Importantly, Ahmed proposes that spaces as well as things can be turned to queer use, if they are occupied for functions unforeseen by the people who left them open.⁹

This chapter will trace the spaces and passages between Lister, language and dictionaries. Some of this ground has already been covered, of course. Scholars have addressed Lister’s ‘crypt hand’, her codewords and her classical philology.¹⁰ At the meta-critical level, there has been robust debate over the validity of applying to Lister labels such as queer and lesbian, with all the contemporary baggage that comes attached to them (see Gonda, this volume). Although I have already used both labels in proximity to Lister, this chapter will focus on the erotic words to which Lister did have access in the early nineteenth century, and the ways in which she found and refitted them to suit her personal needs. For modern readers, lexicography offers one window into Lister’s verbal innovations. It also gives us a view of how she manoeuvred around certain patriarchal language attitudes inherited from the eighteenth century, which derided novelties in women’s speech and writing as signs of ignorance rather than ingenuity.

In what follows, I will survey some of Lister’s unconventional uses of dictionaries, as well as her inventive usage of language to express ideas that went unrecognised by dictionaries in her time. I will close with a comment on her use by dictionaries in our own time, when her life is chronicled in the Dictionary of National Biography and her diaries are quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Throughout, it will be apparent that writing a lexicon is no more an impassive activity than using one. Samuel Johnson may have claimed in his landmark dictionary of 1755 that he did ‘not form, but register[ed] the language … [did] not teach men how they should think, but relate[d] how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts’,¹¹ yet even the largest reference work can only provide a selective view of a living language. That the words, meanings and illustrative quotations selected by standard dictionaries have tended to favour the thoughts of men was a problem that Lister had to overcome, and one that still hampers lexicographers’ treatment of her writing today.

Lister’s Lookups

Admittedly, Lister often did use dictionaries in ways that their writers had intended: as guides to general knowledge and self-improvement. As a child, she had asked her aunt to ensure that the dictionary she bought her would ‘not only instruct [her] in Spelling, but in the … fashionable way of pronounciation [sic]’.¹² Years later, her high-society aspirations still made her sensitive to anything in her speech that might mark her out as parochial. When she was told by Isabella Norcliffe that her pronunciation of iron as it was spelled was a ‘Yorkshirism’, Lister initially ‘resist[e]d’ but then ‘turn[in]g to Sheridan’s pronounc[in]g dict[ionary]’ was vexed to ‘find she [was] right’.¹³ Thomas Sheridan’s dictionary – which aimed at ‘fix[ing] a general standard’ of English pronunciation throughout Britain – did not actually proscribe the northern form of iron, but the only pronunciation it registered was the southern ‘i´-urn’.¹⁴ As Lister’s anxiety makes plain, exclusions such as this were (and are) socially meaningful. When a dictionary is intended to provide a model of ‘standard’ English, then whatever it omits is positioned as illegitimate – and delegitimising certain words can in turn stigmatise the people who use them.¹⁵ At the same time, words may be delegitimised in the first place because of the people who use them, or who are thought to use them.

This illegitimation is not always effected by omission. Johnson’s dictionary, for example, included several headwords that he nonetheless disparaged as ‘women’s cant’, though the quotations with which he illustrated them were all drawn from male authors. Flirtation (‘A cant word among women’) and horrid (sense 2, ‘in womens cant’ [sic]) were supported by extracts from Alexander Pope, frightfully (sense 2, ‘A woman’s word’) by one from Jonathan Swift, and so on.¹⁶ Swift’s own unflattering remark on women’s speech is quoted in the dictionary under fluency (sense 2): ‘The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a scarcity of words; for whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.’ In a similar vein, the Earl of Chesterfield – Johnson’s ineffectual patron – wrote sardonically just before the dictionary’s publication that he hoped Johnson would not ‘proscribe any of those happy redundancies and luxuriancies of expression’ with which the language had been ‘enriched’ by his ‘fair countrywomen, whose natural turn [was] more to the copiousness, than to the correctness of diction’.¹⁷

Lister was thus linguistically marginalised by her gender as well as her provincialism. Yet, while she was willing to defer to a southern standard of pronunciation, her navigation of sexist language norms was more complex. Ironically, though the above male writers dismissed female innovations as misuses, their own writing would be exploited by the innovative Lister, who turned their words to her own ends. She found Swift’s fluency quotation in Johnson and copied it into her diary – but only to apply it to a man, the ‘slow, & tedious, & tiresome’ Dr Scudamore.¹⁸ Given her erudition, Lister doubtless saw herself as the exception to Swift’s rule. More subversively, she took Dr Johnson’s famed rejection of Chesterfield’s belated show of interest in his dictionary – ‘The notice … had it been early, had been kind’ – and reworked it into a defence of her decision to visit, at last, the home of the attractive but unpedigreed Miss Elizabeth Browne. ‘S[ai]d ye D[octo]r’, she reminded herself, ‘H[a]d it been earl[ie]r it h[a]d been kind[e]r…’¹⁹

As other scholars have observed, Lister’s social conservatism was engaged in an intricate dance with her gender nonconformity.²⁰ This sometimes led her to object to improprieties in other women that she privately allowed in herself. While she criticised Isabella for being ‘too fond of gross language’,²¹ Lister made a point of looking up obscene words in the Universal Etymological English Dictionary of Nathan Bailey. She gathered her findings into an encrypted glossary in one of her commonplace books, which included:

• Fuck … fœminam subagitare [to handle a woman sexually]

• Cunt … pudendum muliebre [the genitals of a woman]

• Prick … a mans yard²²

In this case, Lister’s was surely not a use of the dictionary that its compiler had anticipated. Bailey’s screening of the first two definitions behind Latin – a language known to few Englishmen and fewer Englishwomen – exemplifies how elite male stereotypes about women’s discourse existed alongside attempts to control the discourses to which women did have access. Yet, while classical tongues were obstacles to many readers, to Lister they were stepping-stones to knowledge she could obtain in few other places. Her exceptional learning and relative wealth allowed her not only to interpret definitions but to consult dictionaries (as well as other books) that were not addressed to her.

When she was twenty-eight, she learnt from Scapula’s Greek–Latin lexicon that τριβάδες (tribades) were ‘dicuntur fœminæ, perditæ libidinis ac nefariæ lasciviæ: quæ ὀλίσβῳ sese τρίβουσιν mutuo’ (said to be women of depraved lustfulness and vile lasciviousness who mutually rub themselves with an olisbos [i.e. a dildo]).²³ Lister may have been prompted to look up the word after reading a ‘ver[y] interest[in]g’ article on Sappho in the Historical and Critical Dictionary of Pierre Bayle: written for an audience of male scholars, the dictionary candidly described Sappho as ‘a Famous Tribas’ whose poetic fragments included ‘an Ode to one of her Mistresses’.²⁴ Around the same time, Lister was intrigued by allusions she found in Suetonius’s De Vita Caesarum and Martial’s epigrams to the lost erotic works of another female poet, Elephantis.²⁵ Bayle’s dictionary had no entry for Elephantis, but Lister walked down to Halifax’s subscription library to consult the Bibliotheca Classica of John Lemprière. Unfortunately, all she learnt from Lemprière’s dictionary was that Elephantis was ‘a poetess who wrote lascivious verses’.²⁶

Such was the unpredictability of tracing the sexual bi(bli)ographies of ancient women through books written by and for men.²⁷ Still, Lister must have drawn her own conclusions about what Martial had meant when he told of the ‘Veneris novae figurae’ (novel erotic postures) once unfolded by Elephantis.²⁸ Her imagination would certainly be fired up a few months later, when she came across the word crisantis in Juvenal’s satires and looked it up in Adam Littleton’s Latin Dictionary. There, the translation of the lemma crisso as ‘to wag the tail (de muliere dic. in actu copulationis)’ (said of a woman in the act of copulation) so excited Lister that she gave herself an orgasm.²⁹ Though crisso was conventionally applied to cross-sex intercourse, the dictionary entry did not actually make the presence of a man explicit – and this gap was enough for Lister to use as a way in.

Studying anatomy would prove equally stimulating. Among the French medical books Lister bought in Paris in 1830 was Nysten’s Dictionnaire de médecine; while perusing its definition of ‘clitoris &c. &c’., she decided to ‘tr[y] if [she] had much of one’ and ended up masturbating in her seat.³⁰ Nysten’s description of the clitoris as possessing a structure ‘analogue à celle du pénis’ (analogous to that of the penis) would have appealed to Lister, given her daydreams about having a phallus, but perhaps she was more enticed by the adjacent entry for clitorisme, ‘l’abus que les femmes font quelquefois de leur sexe lorsqu’elles ont un clitoris volumineux’ (the abuse that women sometimes make of their sex when they have an enlarged clitoris; see Clark, this volume).³¹ Even if Lister found her body to be of ordinary proportions, her extraordinary use of the dictionary shows that intellectual self-improvement can lie on a continuum with self-discovery, and even with ‘self pollution’ – the definition she gave to masturbation in her personal glossary.³² Although she often regretted the physical consequences of her imagination, she betrayed no shame in the imagination itself, or in its ability to find channels for her desire through hostile scholarly terrain.

Novel Denominations

In conversation with other women, Lister’s learning became a means both of flirting and of showing off, and these performances were sometimes accompanied by language play. To Anne ‘Nantz’ Belcombe she related ‘the anecdote of the ancients using lead plates to prevent pain in their knees the expression which I use & which she understands to mean desire’. Having laid this groundwork, Lister could later seductively tell Nantz about the ‘pain [she felt] in [her own] knees’.³³ To Nantz’s sister, Mariana Lawton, Lister revealed that the emperor Tiberius was said to have owned a ‘picture by Parrhasius of Meleager & Atalanta sucking his queer’.³⁴ Queer (or quere) is well known to researchers as Lister’s euphemism for the vulva, though she applied it to the penis too. Of course, here and elsewhere in the diaries, it is not clear whether Lister actually used queer in speech or if she just inserted it into her write-up afterwards. A similar question hangs over some of the terms Lister attributes to her conversational partners. When Lister reports that Isabella ‘said she was well of her cousin’ – cousin being Lister’s customary word for menstruation – was it Isabella’s word too or has she been paraphrased on the page?³⁵ Cousin, at least, was probably not limited to Lister – or indeed to her social network – but the status of certain other ‘Listerisms’ is harder to appraise.³⁶ Although evidence of use beyond Lister’s diary can sometimes be gleaned from the letters and journals of her friends and lovers, at present it is difficult to be sure which terms were idiolectal (restricted to Lister), duolectal (shared between Lister and one partner) or sociolectal (common to multiple members of Lister’s circle); in the latter cases, Lister might not have been the originator of every term.

Whatever their range of circulation, Lister did not use her codewords for want of a knowledge of their more common – or more esoteric – synonyms. Her private glossary shows that she knew the vulva could be called a ‘cunt’ or ‘pudendum’ and the penis a ‘prick … yard peni[s] veratrum [or] verenda’ as well as a queer, and that menstruation could be called ‘catamen[i]a the menses monthly courses or flowers’ as well as cousin.³⁷ The Earl of Chesterfield may have scoffed at women who took existing words and gave them new meanings – as he said, changing them ‘like a guinea into shillings for pocket money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day’³⁸ – but Lister’s coinages served vital personal and relational functions.

First, creating a private vocabulary and orthography was a way of fostering intimacy with other women and of protecting that intimacy from suspicious eavesdroppers and snooping readers. While Lister lived with Maria Barlow, for instance, the two used the phrase going to Italy to signal Lister’s ‘acknowledg[ing Mrs Barlow] as [her] own & giv[ing] her [her] promise for life’.³⁹ Years before, Lister had devised her crypt hand at least partly so that she and her first love, Eliza Raine, could record the details of their relationship in secret; later, the code allowed Lister and Mariana to shield their correspondence from the latter’s jealous husband.⁴⁰ Lister was understandably annoyed when Isabella divulged to a group of acquaintances that she ‘[kept] a journ[al], & [set] d[o]wn ev[ery]one’s conversat[io]n in [her] peculiar hand-writ[in]g’. Nonetheless, it is hard not to detect a note of pride in Lister’s retort that the code was ‘alm[o]st imposs[ible]’ to decipher.⁴¹

Crypt hand began as a simple Greek letter cipher (a = α, b = β, etc.) but grew to incorporate Latin letters, Arabic numerals and mathematical signs as well. Inventing this labyrinth of glyphs was not just a defensive strategy but an intellectual game – one that allowed Lister to play with the relations between symbols and entire words or names. By 1818, she was placing the mark + or × in the margins of diary entries on days when she masturbated. Cross in turn became her name for the mark and, metonymically, for the act it signified.

• September 1818: thinking of Miss B[elcombe] & only just escaped +⁴²

• December 1819: observe the cross at the head of today[’s entry] oh I wish I could get off this vile habit⁴³

• August 1820: got to Martial & read him till near five when it ended in a cross astride of the bed post⁴⁴

As early as 1817, Lister began using another symbol to mark days on which she had sex with a woman, or what she called kisses (the word is returned to below). This symbol, , resembled a ligature of the Greek letters ος (i.e. os) – perhaps an abbreviation of Latin osculum ‘kiss’.⁴⁵ (In the first of the following quotations, Π stands for Mariana.)

• January 1817: Π gave me two very good kisses last night⁴⁶

• November 1820: I have had nothing to do with Tib [i.e. Isabella] when there is not this mark made ⁴⁷

Beyond intimacy, secrecy and creativity, the resignification of words afforded Lister’s desires and relationships a legitimacy that the standard language would have denied them. At times, this was as simple as laying claim to the word love, as Lister did when she tried to persuade Mary Vallance of the ardour of her feelings during their brief affair at Langton Hall in 1820: ‘I made her understand my use of the word love & still she said she did not wish me not to love her.’⁴⁸ Even one of Lister’s now most familiar declarations – ‘I love & only love the fairer sex … my heart revolts from any other love than theirs’ – becomes radical again when placed beside the limited definitions of love, noun and verb, offered by contemporary lexicography.⁴⁹ For Johnson, the primary meanings of love and to love were ‘The passion between the sexes’ and ‘To regard with passionate affection, as that of one sex to the other’. Usages like Lister’s, had his dictionary acknowledged them at all, would probably have been degraded to sense 7 of the noun, ‘Lewdness’.⁵⁰

Nor would Lister’s more serious romantic unions be intelligible under Johnson’s definition of marriage, ‘The act of uniting a man and woman for life’.⁵¹ Chris Roulston has written in detail about Lister’s and her partners’ reappropriation of marital discourse.⁵² Some of their marriage talk was simply optative – with Mrs Barlow: ‘said again & again I wished I could marry her’ – or similative – with Ann Walker: ‘it is to be as a marriage between us’ – but the lovers also referred to each other unequivocally in (cross-sex) spousal terms.⁵³ Eliza Raine called Lister her ‘husband’, as did Mariana, who further promised to be Lister’s ‘faithful wife’.⁵⁴ Privately, Lister referred to Mariana and Mrs Barlow as her ‘wife & mistress’ respectively.⁵⁵ In these partnerships, the language of marriage carried emotional weight even if it had no legal recognition. At the same time, Roulston points out that the more outwardly legible a same-sex union became as a marriage, the more it risked attracting unfriendly notice.⁵⁶ The desire for validation did not trump the need for discretion.

Still, the subtle and the sentimental were not always opposed. Lister managed to combine the two in her preferred word for sex between women (or an orgasm resulting from it), kiss. This was a well-established literary euphemism for penovaginal sex, but Lister’s usage suggests a further play on the standard meaning of the word – as Johnson had put it, a ‘Salute given by joining lips’.⁵⁷ Lister resignified both the verb and the noun.

• November 1816: [Nantz] said I wanted to make a fool of her & if she had more resolution she would not kiss me again⁵⁸

• October 1820: [Isabella] wanted a kiss … however grubbling seemed to satisfy her⁵⁹

• November 1834: a tolerable kiss [with Ann Walker] last night⁶⁰

Kiss was a word that Lister appears to have shared with at least one of her lovers: the November 1834 quotation has a corresponding entry in Ann Walker’s own journal, which concludes, ‘went to bed – K –’.⁶¹ The October 1820 quotation is also perhaps Lister’s earliest recorded use of grubbling to denote fingering a woman. This may have been another literary borrowing. In general use, grubble simply meant ‘to grope’ without a sexual connotation. Johnson defined it as ‘To feel in the dark’, supported by one quotation from John Dryden’s Don Sebastian, ‘Now let me rowl and grubble thee’, in reference to drawing lots.⁶² But Dryden had given the word a sexual spin elsewhere, in his translation of one of the elegies from the Amores of Ovid. The elegy depicts a man who hopes to meet his mistress at a crowded feast that is also attended by her husband: ‘There I will be, and there we cannot miss, / Perhaps to grubble, or at least to kiss.’⁶³ Dannielle Orr proposes that Lister may have derived her use of grubble from this passage.⁶⁴ While direct evidence is wanting, Lister did own a copy of Dryden’s Miscellanies, and by January 1820 she had acquired an English translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, which often came bound with the Amores.⁶⁵ If she came across Dryden’s version of the elegy, then she could well have sympathised with its lament for forbidden love.

Crucially, although Lister drew from the language of cross-sex intimacy, she rearranged what she took into a personal taxonomy of sexual ethics. While a medical lexicographer such as Nysten might condemn all kinds of masturbation as ‘vice honteux’ (shameful vice),⁶⁶ for Lister it was imperative to maintain a distinction between manually gratifying oneself (crosses) and others (grubbling). Whereas the former was a sin that had ‘no mutual affection to excuse it’, the latter was a valid expression of ‘natural & undeviating feeling’.⁶⁷ This naturalness did not, however, extend to the use of a dildo between women. As Lister declared to Mrs Barlow, that was ‘artifice’: ‘it was very different from mine [and] would be no pleasure to me … I know she understands all about the use of a olisbos [sic]’.⁶⁸ Curiously, while Lister was aware of Sapphic as a general label for sexuality between women, she seems to have used the phrases ‘Saφic regard’ and ‘Sapphic love’ to refer to sex with a dildo in particular.⁶⁹ How she formed this association is unclear, but it may have been influenced by what she had read about Sappho’s status as a tribas, and the tribades’ preference for olisboi, in Bayle’s and Scapula’s dictionaries. At any rate, these acts of stimulation – with hands or with toys, of the self or of another – were ethically discrete, and so they needed to be lexically separate. I have referred to Lister’s novel linguistic uses as forms of ‘play’, but it should be clear that this was play with a serious intent. Lister was not just changing guineas into shillings: she was casting her own currency of desire.

A Legacy in Words

In the present day, dictionary users can find information on Lister’s erotic writings more easily than she could track down those of Sappho or Elephantis. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in addition to discussing her studies, politics and travels, is explicit about ‘her first lesbian experiences’ with Eliza Raine, her love affair with Mariana Lawton and her domestic partnership with Ann Walker.⁷⁰ This entry, first published in the revised DNB in 2004, is one instance of the revisers’ attempts to combat the androcentrism of the dictionary’s first edition (1885–1900) and its supplements, in which entries about women made up 5 per cent of the total. In the 2004 edition, that number rose to 10 per cent.⁷¹

Gendered exclusions have likewise marked the pages of another historical reference work, the Oxford English Dictionary. As had been the case in Johnson’s dictionary more than a century before, the quotation banks of the OED’s first edition (1884–1928) were dominated by the writings of male authors from the traditional literary canon.⁷² Its compilers were also more reticent in print than Lister had been in her private glossary: they included an entry for cock but balked at cunt. In 1933, the sexual sense of lesbian was left out of the OED’s first Supplement because the editor in charge of L objected to it. Lesbian and cunt at last appeared in the more permissive second Supplement (1972–86), along with fuck, after its chief editor consulted several scholars about the propriety of admitting words such as these.⁷³ Notably, one Oxford professor protested that the draft definition of fuck should be altered to specify that in its transitive sense ‘the word is used only of males’. ‘You may not think this worth pointing out,’ he warned, ‘but I incline to think it is; otherwise lady novelists not themselves brought up on the word, and looking for something new, might misapply it!’⁷⁴ Male anxieties about women’s linguistic and erotic agency clearly did not evaporate after the nineteenth century.

There was little change in the OED’s second edition (1989), which was mostly an amalgam of the first edition and its supplements into one alphabetical sequence. However, since the OED was put online in 2000 – at which point work began on fully revising the dictionary for its third edition (OED3) – its editorial team have affirmed their commitment to improving the coverage of ‘women’s writing and non-literary texts’, including diaries.⁷⁵ Lister’s journals have so far played a very small part in this. As of December 2021, Lister is quoted eight times in the online OED, all in entries that have been updated or created for the third edition: see Table 1. Three of the quotations, marked by asterisks, provide the earliest evidence that the OED has been able to find for the senses they illustrate. None of the quotations is for a nonce-use (that is, a word or sense for which Lister is the only author cited). All but one of the extracts were sourced from Helena Whitbread’s second edited volume of Lister’s diaries, No Priest but Love. The last quotation, for potheration, was copied from the now-defunct website www.herstoryuntold.org.uk.

The small number of quotations from Priest, not to mention the inconsistent citing of Whitbread as its editor, suggests that the book was consulted ad hoc for particular words by different contributors, rather than being systematically combed through by one reader. Overall, the words for which Lister is cited – culinary, social, domestic – belong to the same semantic fields that Charlotte Brewer has identified as predominant in the OED’s treatment (on a larger scale) of one of Lister’s near-contemporaries, Jane Austen.⁷⁶ Brewer wonders how much the OED’s favouring of quotations for ‘ordinary’ words from Austen reflects the general diction of her novels, and how much it is inflected by the ‘assumption, that it [is] appropriate to source household, family and domestic terms’ – rather than, say, ‘moral vocabulary’ – ‘from texts written by women’.⁷⁷ Lister was writing a diary, not a novel, and her prose is understandably rich in the language of domesticity and sociability. If Priest had been read methodically for the OED, it could have provided other usages from this sphere that antedate the earliest evidence at present in the dictionary. For example, OED3 traces passé in the sense of ‘No longer fashionable; out of date; superseded’ back to 1844; Lister had employed this sense – ‘I loved her once, but this last was passé’ – in 1824.⁷⁸ Also overlooked is Lister’s use of napkin to mean a menstrual cloth – ‘she considers me too much as a woman … I have aired napkins before her’ (1825) – a sense that OED3 dates only to 1873.⁷⁹

But Lister’s vocabulary encompassed more than ordinary words. The non-standard words used by her or her circle, such as cousin for menstruation and queer for genitals, have not been registered in OED3’s entries for those words. The entries for cross, grubble and kiss have yet to be updated for the third edition, and it remains to be seen whether Lister’s resignifications of them will fare any better. Of course, there are limits to the number of nonce-uses that a dictionary can include, no matter its size. Yet, even if OED3 did not attempt to tease out the precise shades of meaning in, for instance, Lister’s usage of Sapphic, that usage is surely still worth quoting under the dictionary’s current definition of Sapphic (adj. sense 2), ‘Of, relating to, engaging in, or characterized by sexual activity between women or female same-sex desire; = lesbian adj. 2’. This definition was revised in 2018. It is followed by seven quotations taken from texts written between 1761 and 2006 – none of which is attributed to a woman.⁸⁰

Male writers likewise supply all eight of the quotations (from 1602 to 2004) under OED3’s definition of husband (n. sense 2b), updated in 2016: ‘In other (esp. same-sex) relationships in which the two partners are regarded as occupying roles analogous to those in a traditional mixed-sex marriage: the person assuming the role regarded as more stereotypically masculine, i.e. as being equivalent to that of the husband’.⁸¹ All but one of the quotations describe male same-sex relationships. The exception, from the American Journal of Sociology (1931) – ‘These “honies” refer to each other as “my man” and “my woman”, “my wife” and “my husband”’ – does not make the gender of its subjects clear, and users must unearth the original article to learn that it concerns the ‘problem of homosexuality’ at an institution for ‘delinquent girls’.⁸² Even here, the voices of women are mediated by an unsympathetic male ventriloquist. How strikingly different is Mariana’s use of wife in her heartfelt pledge to Lister in Priest: ‘so long as life shall last, I will be your lover, friend & your faithful wife’.⁸³

A similar note of dissent could be added to OED3’s entry for olisbos, ‘A dildo’, revised in 2004. Its earliest quotation comes from an 1887 translation of the Manual of Classical Erotology by Friedrich Karl Forberg, commenting on the tribadic figure of Bassa in Martial’s epigrams: ‘There are expounders..who..have imagined that Bassa misused women by introducing into their vagina a leathern contrivance, an olisbos, a godemiche’ (original ellipses). Lister was familiar with this view. As noted earlier, she had read about women rubbing each other with olisboi in the entry for τριβάδες in Scapula’s Greek–Latin lexicon. However, perhaps because of her own dislike of dildos, she was sceptical of their universality among classical tribades. Her own interpretation of Bassa was that ‘it does not appear that she made use of olisbos a leather penis as Scapula says some of them did’ – a remark that not only argues against that in Classical Erotology but antedates its use of olisbos to 1820.⁸⁴ Of course, this comment appears in one of Lister’s as-yet undigitised papers, and given the limited interest OED contributors have so far shown in her published diaries, it seems doubtful they will read the manuscripts.

The gender bias in these entries is not exceptional.⁸⁵ As a historical dictionary, the OED is bound to document centuries of English in which works by men have been produced more frequently, distributed more widely and valued more highly than those by women. Nonetheless, at any point in time, there is never just one side to the linguistic guinea. As Ahmed reminds us, ‘A history of use is also a history of that which is not deemed useful enough to be preserved or retained.’⁸⁶ The history of a word is a history not only of what it has been used to mean but whom it has been used by. When a dictionary fails to preserve the usage of the marginalised, it reinforces that marginalisation.

There will always be gaps in the record, it is true. Woolf couldn’t think of a term for ‘those who put living people into books’; nor is there a term for those who put living languages into books. Lexicographers cannot capture everything a word has ever meant. Then again, they also cannot constrain everything a word may yet mean. Silence in the lexicon, rather than being an end-point, might only be the start of a conversation. So it was for Lister and Ann Walker one morning in 1834, when the two were travelling in France. As Walker’s journal records, ‘d[ea]r[es]t slept till 8 – & I then went to her – at 9¹⁵ we got up, explained to me all [the] words I had written down that I c[oul]d not find in [the] Diction[ar]y’.⁸⁷ A century and a half before Wittig and Zeig, Lister and Walker showed that moving beyond the dictionary can be an act of intimacy between women. In her own writings, Lister’s linguistic innovations may not have been publicly political in the manner of Lesbian Peoples, but they were equally a means of laying claim to a language whose standard histories were devoid of words that affirmed her emotions and relationships.⁸⁸ Happily, as she discovered, empty spaces provided some of the most fertile ground for self-articulation.

If the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) marks a key and hugely influential moment in the analysis of internal, queer spaces and forms of literary closeting, then the past decade has seen a significant growth in interdisciplinary, scholarly work focusing on closets/closeting located in earlier historical contexts (before 1880 moving backwards into the eighteenth century).¹ This chapter engages with this work, whilst also proposing new ways of reading and analysing Anne Lister’s life writing and negotiation of identity. It introduces the concept of the self-conscious closet and the protective diary code-cover, and their links to Lister’s paradoxical aesthetics. Lister’s code-cover operates as a multifunctional device, serving as a comfort blanket, an exclusionary barrier and an indicator of status and learning. This chapter also reflects on Romantic and classical intertextuality in the journals and asks how this intertextuality contributes to tropes of binary space, as well as foregrounding concerns with thresholds. Finally, it analyses the importance of the recent archival discovery of Ann Walker’s diary (1834–5) and how this sheds new light on Lister’s diary writing, offering new opportunities for a comparative analysis of identity and its refusal.

Spatial Tropes

Lister’s diaries have often been labelled colloquially as the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of lesbian or queer women’s writing and a treasure trove for scholars working on writing, gender and sexuality in the early nineteenth century. From the start of the diaries, Lister is keen to display her erudition as a classical scholar and reader. The first clear reference to classical texts appears in Lister’s loose diary notes of 1808: ‘Wednesday March 2nd Begun Xenophon’s Memorabilum and left off Horace for a while. Monday 7th Begun Tacitus Life of Agricola.’² However, I want to propose a different classical source for my initial analysis. The most obvious reference to charged interior spaces in classical mythology is contained in the tale of Pandora’s box. In the myth, Pandora is described as the first human woman and instructed not to open the box that she receives as a wedding gift. Pandora disobeys, and by opening the box she unleashes the evils of the world, but leaves hope left inside. Classical scholars are still debating whether the survival of hope is a trope of human resilience, or a reminder to maintain faith in even the darkest times. As Todd Worner notes: ‘Too often the myth’s focus is on the evil that is let loose, and not the hope that remains. But what an omission! The endurance of hope embodies just what we have left when all else has gone wrong. And it is simply brilliant.’³

Pandora was still a source of cultural fascination in later nineteenth-century painting and sculpture; the best-known images are provided by the Pre-Raphaelites, as in John William Waterhouse’s Pandora (1896). It is likely that Lister would have been familiar with early nineteenth-century versions of this classical tale and the link to Hesiod’s Works and Days. Pandora is enticed by an ornate and elaborate box (originally a jar) which flamboyantly draws attention to its complex construction and use of ancient shorthand and symbols. Lister is also seduced by classical knowledge and linguistic ornamentation. The diary’s cipher key pulls both the writer/s/’ and readers’ focus in opposite directions, asking to be acknowledged but also obscured in a kind of ambivalent dance. Lister may possibly have developed her code with help from her boarding-school first love, Eliza Raine, given that their early letters are partly encoded, or more likely (given Lister’s interest in classical languages and algebra) she invented it on her own and then passed on the key to Raine.⁴ In any case, Lister later shared the code with a small number of other confidants.

With its showy outer casing and complex interiority, the structural elements of Pandora’s box work as a particularly appropriate analogy for Lister’s diary writing. While Lister’s diary can contain transgressive material within a safe, private space, as with Pandora’s box it is also potentially at risk of discovery and of being ‘revealed’. Furthermore, Pandora’s box forms an uncanny parallel with Lister’s code in the residual hope it offers. The word ‘hope’ famously provided the key to the cipher for John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s code breaking:

It may seem that the word itself is a pure coincidence, in that it could have been any word discovered by Burrell and Lister, yet there are a number of diary entries that reinforce the value Lister placed on stoicism, faith and progress. For example, on 8 September 1835, she notes: ‘Would that we could look on the past with satisfaction, on the present with complacency, and to the future with hope.’⁶

Lister’s use of the term ‘crypt’ rather than ‘cryptic’ in describing her code and coded writing also opens up some intriguing linguistic possibilities. The Oxford English Dictionary lists crypt as ‘[a]n underground room or vault beneath a church, used as a chapel or burial place’, whereas the Cambridge Online Dictionary offers the following definition: ‘A room under the floor of a church where bodies are buried.’⁷ Ironically, Lister’s ‘bodies’ are also buried under the crypt space, although Lister imagines their resurrection through the language of anxiety, as in the following entry from 1819:

Isabella’s declaration creates danger and threat precisely because it fails to recognise both the crypt and cryptic elements of Lister’s diary writing. It also confronts the edge of Lister’s social closet and tries to wrest control away from the closet’s owner, potentially outing her in the process. This interaction highlights the precarity of Lister’s social closeting, in that someone in her inner circle can fail to acknowledge the need for discretion.

Self-Conscious and Unconscious Closets

I argue that Lister’s diary cipher acts as a cover and protection from unwanted attention in the same vein as a physically locked journal. Despite the huge volume of research on the history of diaries, there is a surprising gap or silence regarding diary locks and their use in life writing. The diary’s internal space acts as a room of requirement, or a specially reserved space akin to architectural and domestic closets used by the aristocratic classes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Dominic Janes’s and Danielle Bobker’s recent publications on links between queer sexuality, intimacy and architectural closets in the eighteenth century have provided a very welcome addition to research on spatial and psychological closets, although their primary focus is on male writers and historical figures.⁹

Figure 4 Anne Lister diary entry (28 May 1817). West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, sh:7/ml/e/1/0014.

Bobker’s linking of eighteenth-century closets with twentieth- and twenty-first-century coming-out stories is a timely intervention for those who are working on links between literary structures, psychological processing and queer spaces. The closet as the space of identity construction is moving backwards in recent scholarship away from Michel Foucault’s late nineteenth-century designation of this phenomenon.¹⁰ Here, I need to clarify the difference between an externally imposed closet and a self-conscious closet, the self-conscious closet being the less dangerous or harmful of the two. In an ideal world, no one should ever need a closet. The paradox is that if you know you are in a closet and you acknowledge your othered identity, then your closet is never fully sealed or closed. However, historically individuals with self-conscious closets remain subject to threats from external readings and judgements, hence the need for protective, linguistic armour.

Furthermore, Lister’s peculiar handwriting still represents a challenge for those looking at the diaries and the wider Lister/Shibden Hall archives. Researchers have recently discovered a diary entry previously thought to be part of Lister’s diaries that has now been re-attributed to Ann Walker and included within her year-long diary as part of a project to collate and transcribe Walker’s writing.¹¹ The related Twitter account and website now provide researchers with a chance to compare diary entries written by Lister and Walker during 1834 and 1835. The fact that Walker did not use code suggests that she did not invest in a self-conscious textual closet in the same way as Lister. This is extremely valuable information for scholars looking at self-identity and self-processing in Lister‘s diaries. This dual archive now offers a way to map differences in perception and disclosure in both women’s work. Comparing the two would suggest that no explicit sexual content equals no explicit code.

For example, comparing Walker’s and Lister’s entries for Sunday, 24 August 1834, there is a clear difference in their content. Lister’s entry contains a brief coded section describing their intimacy: ‘she with me in my bed half hour this morning but quite quitely [quietly]’, whereas Walker’s entry begins with a reference to breakfast: ‘Up at 8.20. breakfast, and gaitner came with gaiters, had them to alter.’¹² Walker’s and Lister’s entries from the day before (Saturday, 23 August 1834) follow the same pattern. Walker writes: ‘Up at 10 to 6 – wrote letter to my aunt Monsieur Perrelet brought watches,’ whereas Lister’s entry is as follows: ‘[up at] 8 ¾ [to bed] at 12 ¼ good kiss last night – up at 6 ½ a.m. with regular bowel complaint – Perrelet a little before 9’.¹³ It is interesting to note that Lister does not code the reference to her bowels after her coded ‘kiss’. The omission of sexual details from Walker’s diary entries provides an intriguing contrast to Lister’s focus on sexual satisfaction and a poignant commentary on the differences between the two women’s approaches to recording their activities and their sense of identity. In Walker’s diary, the notion of platonic, romantic friendship is inscribed by the omission of any sexual reference, while Lister’s diary persona of the same period seems increasingly frustrated.¹⁴

Domestic and Physical Closets

A direct search of the word ‘closet’ within the complete diary archives produces seven results: five direct and two indirect. The references are contained in diary entries written between Thursday, 9 April 1818 and Sunday, 15 October 1820. At first glance, these entries seem unremarkable; however, on closer inspection they exhibit an intriguing link between physical and textual closets, offering rare examples of explicit, non-coded content near or within physical closets, such as china, bedroom and water closets.¹⁵

The following example links Lister’s studies to her bedroom closet: ‘(Could not however, manage to get the right answer to example 4, page 123.) then moved all my things out of my room (the blue room) closet and dawdled away all the morning.’¹⁶ In this entry, the connection between ‘the blue room’ and the closet is not clear, or even whether they are the same thing. The bracketing of the blue room is also odd and reads as though Lister is providing clarification for those unfamiliar with the layout of Shibden Hall. The next relevant entry is dated Saturday, 18 July 1818, and follows a similar pattern, as Lister summarises her reading progress and notetaking: ‘Read from page 403–420 volume 3 Les Leçons de l’Histoire, in the china closet, finding this place not quite suit me, went into the red room, read section 28 librum 1… overcome with the heat slept near an hour.’¹⁷ Once again, we note the strange use of a china closet space and the lack of any accompanying qualification or explanation. The same entry contains a reference to a third type of closet, namely a water closet: ‘Just before dressing (Mariana) proposed our going down to the water closet where all over in five minutes she gave me a very good kiss.’¹⁸ This entry creates an explicit link between the physical space of the closet and the recording of sex between women. The final closet entry from 15 October 1820 also includes a mention of potential sexual activity in the water closet:

As water closets adjoining bedrooms were being developed as early as the seventeenth century, there is a longstanding link between closets and sanitation: ‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries small rooms or closets were introduced that adjoined bedrooms. These areas were outfitted with a comfortable commode, under which a pan would be placed.’²⁰ In Lister’s entry above, the water closet as a sanitary space and as a space for illicit sex between women blurs the boundaries between the proper and the improper, and the clean and the unclean.

Working out what a closet is or is not in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is still a challenging proposition for historians and literary critics. According to Bobker, ‘Closet was the generic term for any lockable room in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British architecture. As private wealth grew, closets of all kinds were increasingly available across the social spectrum.’²¹ A further search of references to ‘water closet’ on the WYAS catalogue produces two entries including the ones mentioned above and the following note dated 19 February 1820: ‘Mr D. [Duffin] and I walked with Mrs A. [Anne Norcliffe] and Miss G. [Gage] – kiss in the water closet.’²² Both entries include coded references to orgasms (kisses) occurring in a space that can only be entered by invitation. The qualification of the term ‘closet’ with ‘water’ is helpful in negotiating the lexical ambiguity of the term, marking it as a room rather than a piece of furniture; the water closet as a lavatory or commode room rather than a pot or toilet. Historically, the water closet has moved from a space of shared, aristocratic intimacy in the enfilade to a space usually associated with individual and private use in middle-class homes.

Thresholds and Risk-Taking

The foregrounding of paradoxical space continues throughout the diaries, with their emphasis on layered discourses, liminal spaces and movements across thresholds, as well as the negotiation of binaries more traditionally associated with diary writing: public/private, inside/outside and so on. In addition, Lister created symbols of protection and invitation in her domestic space by the placing of unusual female carved figures on the main staircase of Shibden Hall. The staircase figures mark the edge of public space, providing not only a form of protective guardianship, but also a possible queer invitation, in a vein similar to Christabel’s chamber in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem of the same name (1816):

The time-span of Lister’s life and diary writing overlaps with the evolution of the dark Romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Anira Rowanchild and Alison Oram have explored connections between the gothic and Lister’s textual and social aesthetics in their work.²⁴ Rowanchild’s analysis of gothic connections also provides a succinct summary of competing antinomies in Lister’s world, by arguing that ‘[Lister’s] interest in the picturesque and Gothic was stimulated by their ability to combine display with concealment.’²⁵

I want to suggest a further correspondence between vampiric tropes in Romantic literature and ideas of risk-taking and control in the crossing of Lister’s closeted and uncloseted thresholds. The first notebook of Lister’s diary (not in loose-leaf form) is dated from August to November 1816, the same year as Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, although the volumes which constitute this unfinished poem were composed at an earlier date. While not directly mentioned by Lister, this text provides an intriguing contemporary example of problematic, vampiric thresholds:

The topos of invitation runs through vampiric literature throughout the nineteenth century, as in, for example, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla (1872), in which Carmilla is invited into Laura’s home after a carriage accident. In the same way, Lister issues invitations to her private spaces – both linguistic and physical – to select members of her inner circle but keeps unwanted guests in her wider social circle at bay by using the cipher as a gate. This is not to suggest a literal correspondence between Lister and the vampiric, but rather that her diary writing shares certain characteristics with gothic literature, including a focus on inclusion and exclusion, entry, permission and consent, all of which designate sites of anxiety and erotic charge in early nineteenth-century texts.

While Lister’s code-cover system of crypt hand, secure containment and limited circulation of diary writing is undoubtedly robust and comforting, there are occasions in the diary when she appears confused in her understanding of public/private boundaries and the differences between protected and non-protected spaces. There is one notable instance where Lister’s desire to make a romantic and Romantic gesture undermines the stability of her social and textual closet. In the famous ‘Blackstone Edge’ or ‘three steps’ entry of 19 August 1823, there is an odd inconsistency in the use of the code cipher, with content that would seem to be ripe for coding remaining uncoded. This, in turn, mirrors the emotional and psychological trauma being experienced in the moment and in later references to the incident. In this episode, Lister walks briskly across open countryside beyond the boundaries of the Shibden estate, with the goal of surprising her lover, Mariana Lawton, who is traveling by coach from York towards Halifax. Upon reaching the coach, Lister describes ‘in too hastily taking each step of the carriage & stretching over the pile of dressing-boxes etc., that should have stopped such eager ingress, I unluckily seemed to M – to have taken 3 steps at once’.²⁷ Mariana, in turn, is ‘horror struck’ at Lister’s sudden appearance, which signals a complete lack of proper decorum.

Although Lister thinks she is safe in wanting to surprise her lover, on reflection she records in her diary having breached a prohibited boundary, both physically and symbolically. This entry contains a rare instance of shame being internalised or breaking through Lister’s protective mechanisms and provoking a split subjectivity: ‘I scarce knew what my feelings were. They were in tumult. “Shame, shame,” said I to myself, “to be so overcome.”’²⁸ This long entry moves between coded and uncoded sections, although the same emotional tone is maintained throughout. While the following line is coded, ‘I felt more easily under my own control,’ the entry then slips into plain hand: ‘Alas I had not forgotten. The heart has a memory of its own, but I had ceased to appear to remember save in occasional joking allusions to “the three steps”.’²⁹ The odd humour relating to ‘the three steps’ suggests Lister’s need to deflect her extreme discomfort while remaining haunted by the incident. The three steps not only designate a reference to the coach, but also serve as an indicator of Lister having overstepped the mark. The tension between risk and control is outlined here, as is the difference between Lister’s reading of her wider social context and Mariana’s understanding of acceptable levels of intimacy and their public display. While the following coded entry of 20 August 1823 begins with Lister recording the resumption of sexual activity with her lover at Shibden Hall, the residual trauma is still in evidence. Mariana’s fear of potential exposure requires firm assurances from Lister, as she seeks to regain control of their narrative:

Lister’s reference to deception here is clearly not self-deception, as she displays an acute understanding of her need for self-determination and control, and for the ways in which she is being forced back into a closet imposed by Mariana’s refusal of her oddity. As Lister poignantly and intriguingly reflects in long hand: ‘It was a coward love that dared not brave the storm &, in desperate despair, my proud, indignant spirit watched it sculk [sic] away.’³¹ While Mariana is happy to have sex with Anne, she feels no need to label herself as other or distinctive in the way that Lister does: Mariana is attached to behaviour rather than to identity; in other words she is closeted but not in the same strategic, self-conscious way that Lister is. The exchange between the two lovers foreshadows the difference between behaviour and identity fifty years before this paradigm shift that Foucault records as happening in the 1870s.³² Lister is both ahead of her time and of her time, dissident but also highly conservative.

In constructing her own crypt (hand), Lister knows where the threats are located and, as mentioned, where the bodies are buried. At the same time, she is aware of her own oddity and repeatedly ‘asserts the naturalness of her position’.³³ One of the challenges for scholars working on the Lister diaries is the sheer scale of the entries, which provide an endless supply of variation but also, inevitably, an endless supply of contradictions. For example, the vexation noted above is undercut by instances of Lister’s diary persona brandishing her secret code as a seductive tool, or conversely as a weapon. As Rowanchild suggests, Lister is not above using her code as a means of flirtation when it suits her; on 7 January 1821, Lister writes that she gave a new love interest, Miss Vallance, ‘the crypt hand alphabet’.³⁴ One of the diaries’ central enigmas concerns the choice of topics that Lister chooses to encrypt, which include financial matters, legal discussions, medical concerns, estate management and certain political issues, as well as sex and desire.³⁵ Lister’s choice of coded ‘areas’ offers an apposite and eerie foreshadowing of the connections between sexuality and, increasingly, the pathologising institutional discourses discussed by Foucault in his History of Sexuality.³⁶ Coded diary passages often alternate between descriptions of sexual activity and these broader social concerns. For example, diary transcripts for 1816 include coded mentions of kisses (orgasms) and coded passages discussing business and inheritance issues. On 15 August 1816, Lister writes in code: ‘L had a kiss’, and on 5 November she also records in code:

There are also numerous mixed diary entries that combine plain hand and crypt hand and others which are coded but do not seem to relate directly to sex or business. For instance, the diary entry for 14 September 1814 mentions a gap in diary writing and the copying of previous notes (the whole entry was originally written in code): ‘Wrote out this part of my journal from notes after my return here from Lawton which accounts for the date of my getting this book, Saturday, the fourteenth of September one thousand eight hundred and sixteen.’³⁸ This fully coded entry reads as an apology for lateness to the diary project itself and as a note on accountability. In this entry, the diary persona appears to role-play or to be rehearsing the role of professional author as a way of establishing a form of regular creative practice. Lister’s diary persona at times displays concerns regarding the temporal disjunction or gap between the original experience and its recording in diary form. New research presented by Jenna Beyer and Dannielle Orr at the recent Anne Lister Research Summit has also focused on issues raised by the diaries’ indexing and ordering.³⁹ Lister’s reticence is understandable given the enduring social judgement levelled at female writers and ideas of ‘creative femininity’ in the early nineteenth century. As Gillian Paku suggests:

This may also partly explain the diaries’ lack of references to female writers, with the exception of Lady Caroline Lamb and her novel Glenarvon, which is discussed by Lister and Mariana.⁴¹ Upon its publication in 1816, the same year as Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, Glenarvon caused a sensation as a transgressive novel, famously offering an early example of a cross-dressing character in a nineteenth-century novel. According to Bill Hughes: ‘Glenarvon was seen by critics as transgressing gender by its clashing of genres … genre and gender become confused like the “doubtful gender” of Lamb herself with her notorious cross-dressing.’⁴² The diary section pertaining to Glenarvon codes only the novel’s title, although its presence offers a pointed and painful reminder of discussions between Lister and Mariana earlier in the day concerning Lister’s masculine appearance and failure to pass as a feminine woman. As the entry notes, it is an example of a ‘scandalous’ text: ‘Agreed that Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel, Glenarvon, is a very talented but a very dangerous sort of book.’⁴³ Lister’s reference to Glenarvon is both provocative and ironic.

While the desire to claim Lister as a dissident, queer icon for contemporary LGBTQIA readers and researchers is understandable, failure to acknowledge Lister as a product of her own time is also problematic. As Chris Roulston argues:

Lister’s self-consciousness in the diaries is also double-edged; she displays, on the one hand, self-knowledge and awareness and, on the other, forms of social discomfort and non-belonging. Despite her sense of class superiority in her Halifax social circle, there are entries that express awkwardness and insecurity, as in this entry from 29 April 1832: ‘I felt, myself in reality gauche, and besides in false position. I have difficulty enough in the usage of high society and feeling unknown, but have ten times … I will eventually hide my head somewhere or other … The mortification of feeling my gaucherie is wholesome.’⁴⁵

Diary Code as Split Paratext?

In Paratexts; Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), Gérard Genette suggests that ‘[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is rather a threshold.’⁴⁶ Genette uses the term to recognise framing devices employed by writers and publishers, such as indexes, dates and dedications. I want to argue that Lister’s diary crypt hand works equally as paratext and text. Discussions of paratexts and marginalia are still on the margins of the history of literary scholarship, perhaps in an ironically appropriate way. The critical terrain that exists between literary theory, and textual and autobiographical criticism is underexplored. Discussions of codes in life writing are still seen as niche, specialist or as an offshoot of corpus linguistics.⁴⁷ There is a need for new conceptual life writing frameworks that would allow us to work with explicitly coded texts, Lister’s diaries being a prime example.

Lister’s code occupies an unusual position by being both inside and outside the text, as both cover and content. With the exception of additional cipher and loose-leaf pages which pre-date the start of the journal notebooks, there are no formal paratexts outside of code use in Lister’s diaries. At this point, it is helpful to consider other diaries that use code. Parts of Samuel Pepys’s diaries, written in the 1660s and first published in 1825, offer a similar use of code to cover explicit sexual content, albeit from a heteronormative perspective. The publication of the first decoded edition of Pepys’s diaries was within Lister’s lifetime. As with Lister’s diaries, Pepys’s diaries were hidden for a period of one hundred and fifty years, with the explicitly coded diary sections only deciphered in 1819.⁴⁸ Given that, as far as we know, Lister started to develop a form of code from 1808 onwards, it is unlikely that she would have been influenced by knowledge of Pepys’s code use.⁴⁹ Nor do Lister’s diaries contain any indexed reference to Pepys’s work. There are later examples of coded diaries by queer public figures, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, but as someone who was highly ambivalent about his sexual identity, Wittgenstein’s use of code more likely designates a form of internalised homophobia.⁵⁰

While the use of code in diaries produces a binary between the coded and the uncoded, the levels and layers within the written space are more nuanced and non-binary, providing an interlocking structure similar to Eve Sedgwick’s ‘mesh of queer possibilities’:

It is the protection afforded by the code-cover that allows Lister to explore the wider parameters of her gender and sexuality and to reject contemporary socially closeted romantic friendship models. As Leonieke Vermeer argues, ‘[t]he study of disguising strategies in diaries can provide us with information on a subject for which source material is rare: bodily and sexual experiences.’⁵² Vermeer highlights one of the key contradictions in the work of coded diary writers, including Lister, in that ‘a code draws attention to the secrets it supposedly conceals’.⁵³ In the process of code-covering, Lister tantalises potential readers and highlights taboo elements. While her code is an oxymoronic, obvious disguise, there are also elements within the diaries that offer other kinds of obscure writing or silences: missing dates, blank sections, crammed marginalia and, for the modern reader, illegible handwriting. Lister’s use of crypt hand and code produces a strange anomaly, in which the diary subject speaks both in, and through, the code-cover as a form of ventriloquism. It also gestures towards forms of historical biofiction, which focus on the expression and recovery of posthumous voices.⁵⁴

Lister’s diary persona and voice are still being recovered through ongoing diary transcriptions. With the development of twenty-first-century computer software, large, historical diaries are now being made available on and in different platforms. These new resources are extremely helpful for researchers, but also have the effect of producing the journal in a multiplicity of sequences, patterns and datings, depending on areas of particular interest. The Lister diaries will continue to evolve through the completion of transcription and sequencing online; these diaries are still in the process of being written and remain unfixed and open to further interpretation.

The link between diary writing and psychological processing is often featured in studies of life writing. The volume of life writing produced by queer writers in the nineteenth century suggests a clear link between the processing of sexuality, gender and other consciously closeted states. Another example is Works and Days by the Michael Fields (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a diary covering the years 1888–1913, made up of multiple volumes still in the process of being transcribed.⁵⁵ Works and Days offers another example of a multifunctional text that negotiates professional and personal terrain in relation to queer lives, intimacy and the question of identity.

It is useful here to make a distinction between code-cover and additional or accidental opacity. The relationship between historical diary writing and potential audiences (including chosen audiences and the author-as-audience) continues to provoke debate, as do discussions on diary writing as form/genre within potential life writing canons. Some researchers, such as Rebecca Hogan, argue that diaries are more subversive in their openness, as a ‘plurality of voices and perspectives’, and as ‘a form which preserves “otherness within the text” and within the self’.⁵⁶ Conversely, many researchers stress that diary writing personas are as performative as fictional characters.

Lister’s diary shows her life writing persona trying on different hats, outfits, languages and alternative signifiers, with voices that refuse to accept easy labelling or classification. We cannot, of course, know the level of censorship that Lister imposed upon herself and her writing, and the extent to which topics and extremities of feeling were omitted or considered to be off-limits. Meta-commentaries on diary writing are unusual before the twentieth century and even rarer for unpublished life writing. Ironically, producers of diary notebooks, for example, Letts the stationer, founded in 1796, were keen to promote the idea of diaries as private or confessional works. In one advertisement, they instructed writers to ‘Use your diary with the utmost familiarity and confidence, conceal nothing from its pages nor suffer any other eye than your own to scan them.’⁵⁷

Treating Lister as a life writer and placing her writing alongside other substantial diaries published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would undoubtedly shed further light on the connections between form and identity, as in, for example, those of John Evelyn (1640–1706, first published in 1818), Samuel Pepys (1660–9, first published in abridged form in 1825), and later nineteenth-century queer life writers such as the Michael Fields.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have shown the ways in which Lister’s diary code supports the negotiation of her self-conscious closet, as both shield and psychological comfort blanket. There are multiple references to comfort in the diaries as well as references to Lister’s robust code-cover, as in, for example: ‘What a comfort my journal is. How I can write in crypt all as it really is … and console myself.’⁵⁸

I have reflected on existing conceptual frameworks and definitions of the closet derived from contemporary queer theory and proposed new readings based on the differences between self-conscious and unconscious closeted writing. There continue to be difficult questions concerning the links between explicitly coded texts and the closet, for example, when is a closet not a closet? As a diarist, Lister uses her code to combine competing elements of her diary persona into a form of paradoxical writing that both attracts and repels potential readership. The tension between code as cover and code as content would undoubtedly also benefit from readings provided by newer conceptual areas such as surface studies.⁵⁹ Using the Lister diaries, I propose a case for the reclamation of ‘missing’ closets in queer women’s writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to argue for their inclusion in interdisciplinary studies of psychological, social and physical spaces.