This chapter focuses on an area of Lister’s writing that has been overlooked in recent scholarship: the relationship between coding and closeting in the diaries. It suggests that more work is needed on the psychological processing within the diary volumes, and that the complexity of these volumes has not been well served by readings based on, or within, lesbian continuum models. In this chapter I propose an analytical framework derived from a combination of contemporary queer theory and historicism to recover Lister’s self-conscious closet. The relationship between coded and uncoded sections of the diaries is also ripe for further analysis. In using these alternating spaces, Lister chooses when, and when not, to disclose aspects of her queerness. The Lister of the diary volumes is never closeted from herself and is aware of her own ’oddity’ at the same time as she asserts her own version of normality. This chapter illustrates how a differently framed reading of the decoded sections can foreground the neglected dichotomy between coding and closeting. It also proposes new readings of the uncoded sections of the diary text, which show how these areas produce an additional public closet in which Lister depersonalises some of her writing.

Reveals the profusion of boxes in early modern England, valued for practical and aesthetic reasons. While boxes are often very mundane, they might also be associated with events such as marriage, and are frequently bequeathed as items of intrinsic value. Wills and inventories demonstrate the ready slippage between boxes as furnishings for rooms, and furnishings for the mind – one author stores up his faith in ‘my Breste, the Cheste of my mynde’. His words illustrate the blurring of the material and the metaphorical that can happen inside boxes. Considering Elizabeth I’s bedchamber, hiding places in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and moments of enclosure in John Donne, this chapter interweaves close readings of wills and prayer manuals with objects such as velvet boxes and parish chests. It establishes a key quality of the box: although it is one of the most physically solid and constraining kinds of object, it offers flexible imaginative possibilities.