Hello and welcome to Queerous Fact. My name is Eli. I'm Hanish. I'm Alice. And we're a queer history podcast.

Every fortnight, one of us will talk about a topic from queer history around the world and throughout time.

Today we're going to talk about Anne Lister, who was a 19th century landowner and diarist.

So in terms of content warnings for this episode, we actually just don't have a lot to warn for for once, which is refreshing.

There is a brief mention of Anne being beaten at school.

We make a joke about murder, and we talk about STDs for a bit, but that's really all we could come up with.

So Anne Lister was born on the 3rd of April, 1791, and she lived until 1840.

And throughout much of her life, certainly for all of her adult life, she kept incredibly

detailed journals.

And this is incredibly exciting because they are arguably the most significant source that we have about the lives of same-sex-attracted women in her time.

They're this really delightful mix of just like careful, methodical chronicling of daily life in a small town in West Yorkshire in the early 1800s.

And depictions of passionate love affairs with other women.

The latter portions were written in code, which is just so cool in and of itself.

It's very cool.

Yeah, it's a code that she devised herself.

It's basically just a cipher of like mathematical symbols and Greek letters and things

like that to the English alphabet.

I have a copy of it, but it's clearly one that someone's worked out themselves and there's

a pure inaccuracy. So hopefully by the time this is on the internet, I'll have got like a proper one.

Yes, and hopefully we can publish it somewhere.

Yeah, we'll put up a copy of it if we at all can, because it's just really cool to have a

secret lesbian code from the 1800s.

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