These included her courtship of, and remarkable union with, Ann Walker, in what was in effect a lesbian marriage. She subsequently went into the archives to mine them and through years of work – wrestling with a voluminous beast of a diary and its coded sections – uncovered the stories of Lister’s later life. “The women students on the new opportunities class…were absolutely amazed that a woman so many generations earlier had been able to enjoy freedoms which they could scarcely dream of.”įired by her students’ enthusiasm, Liddington “got completely gripped” by the Lister diaries. “This was 1988 and Halifax was quite a conservative a small ‘c’ town,” she tells Times Higher Education. Her class was aimed at adults “who had missed out on educational chances first time round” – and they were thrilled by what they heard. Liddington, now an honorary research fellow at Leeds, was herself living in Halifax. Their lecturer, Jill Liddington, told them about Anne Lister (1791-1840), a polymath who broke with conventions of female behaviour, and whose diaries record her plentiful sexual and romantic adventures with women – despite the obstacles of living in the early 19th century and in Halifax.

In the late 1980s in Halifax, a former textile-manufacturing town in West Yorkshire, a group of women were taking a local history class with the University of Leeds.

Female fortune by jill liddington