Travel was key to Anne Lister’s sense of self and has played an important part in shaping her posthumous reputation. Famously, she was the first amateur to climb the Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838 and died on one of her most ambitious journeys to Russia in 1840. Scholarship on her diaries in the mid-twentieth century highlighted these and other more local travels. Changing social attitudes, which made possible the publication of decoded passages of Lister’s diaries in the 1980s, meant that Lister’s diaries were no longer valued primarily for their social history content. To understand Lister’s life fully we need, I suggest, to investigate more closely how Anne Lister’s diaries can be read as life writing and travel writing. Citing evidence from Lister’s home tours in the 1820s, I will argue that a distinctive female voice such as Lister’s is an important,but until now neglected, element in the recovery of female travel writing, which has been a recent focus for scholars. I will show that descriptions of travel in Lister’s diaries offer both a rich resource for the study of tourism and also contribute to our understanding of her emotional life and relationships.