Anne Lister: How first lover at Yorkshire school prompted 'Gentleman Jack' to begin her diaries

For posterity, it had huge significance too, for had the girls not met, Anne may never have started her extensive and detailed diaries. The five-million word collection held by West Yorkshire Archive Service offers great insight into her life as a West Yorkshire landowner, business woman, traveller and lesbian in the first decades of the 19th century, also painting a picture of what the era was like for those in high society.

Using her diaries, Huddersfield-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright was able to bring Anne’s story to life in historical TV drama Gentleman Jack. But whilst she chose to focus on the 1830s, when Anne was living at –and restoring - Halifax’s Shibden Hall and developing a marriage to neighbouring heiress Ann Walker, Anne’s first lesbian encounter was years earlier, at the Manor School in York.

Anne was sent to the elite girls’ boarding school in 1805 at the age of 14 and stayed until the early summer the following year. It was there that she met fellow-pupil Eliza Raine, a girl of Anglo-Indian parentage. Two centuries later, Anne and Eliza’s relationship has inspired a new book by Canadian author Emma Donoghue. “It looks at part of Anne Lister’s life that’s very little explored from way back before she ever wrote her diary,” 53-year-old Donoghue explains.

For Learned by Heart, she stuck closely to the facts she could find, drawing on a series of letters between Anne and Eliza. “Some historical fiction writers feel they can make it all up, it’s a novel. Whereas I really love that challenge of trying to make a story as true as I can make it and satisfying fiction at the same time,” says Donoghue.

“I look for cases where there are huge gaps in the knowledge. For instance, we know so little about Eliza Raine’s background - we know who her father was but we don’t have her mother’s name and we know she was sent off to England at six and was orphaned soon afterwards so there’s huge gaps in the story. I love digging up cases like this where ordinary biography and history are not going to be able to reach these lives. The techniques of fiction are then really useful.”

Donoghue has been writing since her teens, growing up in Dublin, Ireland as the youngest of eight children. With her mother an English teacher and father a professor of English, books could be found on nearly all walls of the house. She wrote poetry often from early in childhood and her first novel followed at the age of 19. But it was a delve into the life of Anne Lister that paved the way for her first two-novel deal with Penguin.

Donoghue came across historian and writer Helena Whitbread’s publication of the first volume of Anne’s diaries shortly after she moved to England in the early 1990s. Donoghue wrote her first play – I Know My Own Heart – based loosely on Whitbread’s book of the same name. Whitbread came to see it, and put Donoghue in touch with a literary agent.

“Helena and Anne Lister between them really started my career,” she reflects. “I never usually go back to something I’ve written about but I always remained curious about Anne Lister, especially as the decades have gone by and more and more has been found out about her and the women in her life, and more interest has been attracted to her, peaking with the amazing Sally Wainwright series Gentleman Jack.”

Anne’s first love affair with Eliza stuck in her mind. In 1998, Donoghue had spent a couple of months as a writer in residence in York, just a stone’s throw from the building where Anne and Eliza had met at school. In 2015, she embarked on a research trip to Yorkshire to see Shibden Hall and Anne’s diaries.

She also explored around 100 letters, written between Eliza and Anne or by other people about the pair. They hadn’t been transcribed “but I asked and a group of volunteers transcribed them for me. So this novel is in some way crowd sourced in a way I’ve never done before and I’m so grateful”.

“Even though it’s taken so long, partly because I’ve had so many other books to write, it’s the perfect moment for it because first of all the community of people researching these women has grown and so much more has been found. But also I think people’s interest in a figure like Eliza Raine has surged as well. A show like Bridgerton, for instance, shows that there’s this fascination with the fact that the past is not this all-white version we grew up on in 1970s and 80s TV adaptations. Britain has always been diverse, it’s just a matter of representation. I think people are hugely interested in the perspective of somebody like Eliza Raine on regency society.”

Anne and Eliza began a friendship at school which developed in intensity, reaching the point where they wanted to spend their lives together. "Eliza seems to be the one girl of colour in school and Anne was this troublesome tomboy, notably androgynous,” Donoghue says. “She was highly self-educated but frequently got in trouble and was known to be very flirtatious with girls from early on. These two mavericks ended up in an attic room together and they fell madly in love...They called each other husband and wife. They exchanged music, they wrote poems. It was highly intense and unforgettable to both of them.”

The girls corresponded after Anne left the school and in the summer of 1806, Eliza’s first visit to Halifax took place. Her departure some weeks later had far-reaching consequences, being the trigger which prompted Anne into starting a journal. Anne went on to engage in a number of other relationships with women, whilst Eliza suffered a mental decline and spent much of the rest of her life in an asylum in York. “I think their relationship was hugely significant,” Donoghue reflects. “I think before it, Anne Lister didn’t know herself. Once she had this love affair in Eliza, she knew she was only interested in women and wanted a fully sexual and marital style relationship with women.

“In terms of Eliza, I think a life was even more transformed. She was much more conventional, very beautiful and had this fortune so I think she probably would have got married and settled down. But I think meeting Anne set her on this other course.

"She considered a couple of male suitors but clearly her heart wasn’t in it and she was fixated on Anne. This is not to blame Anne Lister at all but I think in effect it did rather mess up Eliza’s life. But it also gave her a very intense love to look back on…In her letters she sounds wonderfully intense and alive when she’s talking about her schooldays with Anne. I think for the first time Eliza felt that she really mattered to someone.”

Donoghue, who also writes drama for screen and stage, hopes her book inspires other people to explore more about Eliza and her story. “I also hope it gives the many Anne Lister fans great pleasure too because we’re all so gutted at the cancellation of Gentleman Jack.”

Learned by Heart is out now, published by Picador. Donoghue will be on tour in the UK later this month including a date at Square Chapel and Calderdale Industrial Museum, both in Halifax, on September 30, and another at York Literature Festival on October 3.