Female Fortune is essential reading for those who watched Gentleman Jack and want to know more about the extraordinary woman that was Anne Lister. This 2022 edition includes a fascinating Afterword on the recent discovery of Ann Walker’s own diary. Tensions grew to a melodramatic crescendo when news reached Shibden of the pair being burnt in effigy. Yet Ann Walker had an inconvenient number of local relatives, suspicious of exactly how Anne Lister could pay for all her grand improvements.
And socially very ambitious, she employed architects to redesign both the Hall and the estate. Politically active, Anne Lister door-stepped her tenants at the 1835 Election to vote Tory.
Jill Liddington’s classic edition of the diaries tells the story of how Anne Lister wooed and seduced neighbouring heiress Ann Walker, who moved in to live with Anne and her family in 1834. The diaries were included on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011. Her extraordinary diaries, running to 4–5 million words, were partly written in her own secret code and recorded her love affairs with startling candour. She was an impressive scholar, fearless traveller and successful businesswoman, even developing her own coalmines. Lesbian landowner Anne Lister inherited Shibden Hall in 1826. Jill remarks “Anne Lister was amazingly deft at controlling situations and manipulating people to further her considerable ambitions.”Īs well as inspiring the BBC series, the book was also chosen by Gentleman Jack’s BAFTA-winning creator Sally Wainwright on Desert Island Discs as the book she’d want to take with her if she was trapped on a desert island."Female Fortune is the book which inspired Sally Wainwright to write Gentleman Jack, now a major drama series for the BBC and HBO. In her book Female Fortune, Jill explores Anne Lister’s world from her 1833-36 diaries and analyses the role of gender in Anne’s activities in what were, are the time, almost exclusively male domains.
Anne was an heiress, scholar, traveller and estate owner who after inheriting Shibden Hall seduced a neighbouring heiress, consolidated their estates and developed coal deposits there. Set in 1832 West Yorkshire, the BBC series is inspired by the true story of Anne Lister, an LGBTQ+ trailblazer who attempts to revitalise her inherited home, Shibden Hall. Dr Jill Liddington’s book Female Fortune has inspired the creation of BBC One series Gentleman Jack.ĭr Liddington is an Honorary Research Fellow within the School whose expertise lies in women’s history, particularly in the interplay between gender and class in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.
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