A Deep Dive into the Anne Lister's Trip to Paris
Friday, June 12, 2026 - 14:00
In order to make this dissertation manageable, I will be posting it in smaller segments--portions of the fairly lengthy chapters.
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Full citation:
Orr, Dannielle. 2006. A Sojourn in Paris 1824-25: Sex and Sociability in the Manuscript Writings of Anne Lister (1791-1840). (Doctoral Dissertation, Murdoch University)
Introduction
This is a doctoral dissertation so it’s structured somewhat differently than a book would be, although of similar length. The work examines the period of Anne Lister’s life when she was in Paris in 1824, and particularly how she interacted with a community of women there, both socially and romantically. The focus is how Lister’s various written records document and reflect those interactions, including how her “crypt hand” cipher reflects her psychological states and processes.
The dissertation is structured in six parts: an introduction, three sections examining key aspects of the topic, a conclusion section, and appendices. The main sections are a bit awkward in length–a bit long for conveniently covering in a single post, while their subsections are perhaps shorter than ideal for individual blogs. But I’ll mostly be covering them in shorter chunks in order to meet my artificial goal of blogging every day for Pride Month.
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The introduction begins with an overview of Lister’s life and a brief explanation of her importance to various aspects of history. [Note: I’ll skip the background details, as I assume readers are familiar with the general history.]
A key element of Lister’s extensive documentary record in journals and correspondence is her romantic and sexual interactions with women, beginning in her earliest diary during her school days when she began an intense romance with fellow student Eliza Raine, continuing with a more casual relationship with neighbor Isabella Norcliffe, an extended but ultimately unsatisfactory romance with Mariana Lawton, the brief affair with Maria Barlow that is central to this study, and her eventual romantic partnership with Ann Walker that lasted until Lister’s death.
For about a century, excerpts from Lister’s papers were published to illustrate various aspects of her life, but with the lesbianism carefully censored. Not until the 1980s was this aspect of her life made public, after which it became a focus of intense interest for queer and women’s historians. The explicit, detailed, and revealing descriptions of her sexual attitudes and activities upended the conventional view of 19th-century women’s same-sex relationships as being limited to conventional sentimentality and platonic affection.
But Lister’s sexuality continued to be interpreted in ways that failed to disturb existing narratives. She was a unique anomaly. She was an early example of the sexologists “congenital invert.” She could be interpreted in the framework of butch-femme culture. Some even considered the journals to be inauthentic. But all these approaches ignored the historic context of her life rather than using her to expand the understanding of early 19th century sexuality.
There were a number of possible models for same-sex relations that Lister could have “tried on” to understand herself. She explicitly rejects the label of “sapphist.” [Note: Although she appears to associate the word with specific behaviors, especially the use of a dildo.] Other possible identities include bluestockings (whose circles often included same-sex bonds of various types) or theatrical crossdressing up (given that she identified her preferred sartorial style as “masculine”).
The text reviews various takes on Lister by previous authors working with her material. These produced different views depending on the interests (and avoidances) of the researchers. Muriel Green- focused on Lister as a traveler and erased any mention of her sexuality. Liddington was most interested in her social and political context, while acknowledging her sexuality. Whitbread focused primarily on her sexuality but shaped her presentation of the material around the idea of Mariana as the central “great romance.” Others have presented a more integrated view of her life but worked from the existing published excerpts rather than returning to the original documents.
Orr cautions against using Lister’s life as a single cornerstone for new understandings of homosexual history, or trying to fit her life into existing categories, yet the value that Lister contributes to our historic understanding cannot be overstated.
Given this, Orr sets about to create an experiential understanding of Lister’s relationship to her world, in particular how she initiated and developed erotic relationships with women, as recorded in her own writings. The choice of Maria Barlow for this is due to several factors. The entire period of their interactions is well documented. It began at a time with Lister at extensive previous sexual experience. The relationship progressed significantly (unlike some briefer flirtations). And this particular relationship has not been seriously studied previously.
Barlow was a mature and experienced woman–a widow with a child. She was economically independent and met Lister on a relatively equal footing. The relationship is also of analytical interest in that it began within a female community (at a boarding house) that illustrates the everyday interactions and social connections against which it is differentiated. Another feature is that the relationship developed when Lister was displaced from her family setting (and from English culture entirely) allowing the highlighting of her sexual habits and textual practices against a neutral background.
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