Sexuality in Translation: Anne Lister and the Ancients

Lister and the Ancients

Abstract

Anne Lister (1790-1841), the now famous early nineteenth-century Yorkshire diarist who candidly recorded her affairs and romantic relationships with women over the course of three decades, has become a touchstone for lesbian history. The Lister diaries defy historical expectations on so many levels that--in the same way as Lister seduced her female lovers--it is hard as scholars not to be captivated by their content. For compelling reasons, the scholarly literature has tended to focus on Lister's self-sufficiency and independence, and her ability to construct a coherent, intelligible and unified sense of self at a time when the concept of a 'lesbian' sexual identity was largely denied. To a large extent, Lister created this unique self through her varied reading practices, making use of the reading material available to her to construct and fashion an intelligible sexual style. However, while Lister read extensively in multiple genres and several languages, from Rousseau to the Romantics to philosophy to contemporary fiction, her engagement with the Ancients was among the most arduous of her intellectual endeavors. Unlike the majority of Lister's other texts, the Classics required a turning away from the present and an immersion in the past, and in contrast to the Romantics, they demanded not only a lifelong apprenticeship in Greek and Latin, but questioned particular logics of temporality, gender identity and knowledge acquisition. I argue that as much as offering valuable clues to her sexuality, as earlier scholarship on Lister has argued, the Ancients also produced in Lister a fragmented and not always comfortable dialogue with the process of self-invention. Through an analysis of Lister's gradual mastery of Greek and Latin, and her use of the Ancients both as cultural capital and as a coded language for 'queer' sexual practices, I show how Lister's encounter with the Ancients could at times unravel as much as affirm her precarious gendered and sexual self-construction.