Sally Wainwright on Anne Lister

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.1 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2019

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sally Wainwright’s new drama Gentleman Jack tells the story of Anne Lister, the Victorian landowner and industrialist whose coded diaries have revealed a hidden world of lesbian relationships and class and gender struggles in 19th Century Yorkshire. Starring Suranne Jones, the series covers just two years of Anne’s eventful life, including the beginning of her relationship with future wife Ann Walker. Jenni is joined by Sally and Anne Choma, author of Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister.

As part of a series about mental health we have been asking women how it feels to live with a mental illness. Heather is now 35 and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 29. In 2013, she was snapped by a street photographer at the height of her psychosis. Heather has tracked the photo down and shows it to our reporter Jo Morris. Although the photo is hard for her to look at it also reminds her how far she has come.

Adelaide Bon was raped by a stranger when she was nine years old. She told her parents who registered the crime with the police. She talks to Jenni about the impact that day had on her life and how decades later she came face to face with her rapist in a Paris courtroom, experiences she describes in her book ‘The Little Girl on the Ice Floe’.

Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Laura Northedge

Interviewed Guest: Sally Wainwright Interviewed Guest: Anne Choma Interviewed Guest: Adelaide Bon

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.6	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.4	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable
0:14.3	experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC
0:20.4	makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	BBC Sounds.
0:38.0	BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
0:41.0	Hello Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Women's Our Podcast on Wednesday, the 15th of May. In today's programme, The Little Girl on the Ice Flow, the Memoir of a French woman whose life was dominated by the rape she suffered at the age of nine
0:57.0	and the impact of her attacker finally being found and as part of the BBC's mental health season, living with what used to be called
1:05.8	manic depression and is now known as bipolar disorder.
1:11.5	I very much doubt you've missed the fact that the new Sunday night serial on BBC 1
1:15.8	is to be Gentlemen Jack. It's been advertised everywhere. Surround Jones is to play Ann
1:22.2	Lister who was a Halifax landowner and
1:24.7	industrialist in the early 19th century. She lived at Chipton Hall which is
1:29.7	where the copious diary she wrote were hidden and were only found in the late 1930s to reveal an extraordinary life.
1:38.0	Lister had travelled widely, inherited the house and the business, was fearless in her choice of dress wearing clothes more suited to a man than a woman in her time and she wrote openly about her love for women.
1:52.0	The more racy parts of the diary were written in code.
1:55.9	In the first episode to be shown on Sunday we find Anne in bed with her married lover
2:00.5	Mariana Lawton who's just suggested Anne's life would be easier if she got married.
2:07.0	No one knows you better than I do.
	...

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