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Shibden Hall was built in the early fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century the Listers’ predecessors there had been Lords of the Manor of Halifax. Particularly after she went to live at Shibden in 1815, Anne Lister grew acutely conscious of this ancient acreage and lineage. 1 And, especially after she returned from Europe in the early 1830s, she was proud to lay claim to it as ‘my own place where my family had lived between 2 & 3 centuries, I being the 15th possessor of my family and
"Female Fortune is the book which inspired Sally Wainwright to write Gentleman Jack, now a major drama series for the BBC and HBO.
Lesbian landowner Anne Lister inherited Shibden Hall in 1826. She was an impressive scholar, fearless traveller and successful businesswoman, even developing her own coalmines. 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. The diaries were included on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011.
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. Politically active, Anne Lister door-stepped her tenants at the 1835 Election to vote Tory. And socially very ambitious, she employed architects to redesign both the Hall and the estate.
Yet Ann Walker had an inconvenient number of local relatives, suspicious of exactly how Anne Lister could pay for all her grand improvements. Tensions grew to a melodramatic crescendo when news reached Shibden of the pair being burnt in effigy.
This 2022 edition includes a fascinating Afterword on the recent discovery of Ann Walker’s own diary. Female Fortune is essential reading for those who watched Gentleman Jack and want to know more about the extraordinary woman that was Anne Lister.
Shibden papers. Certainly Ann's letter to her brother-in-law reads as if it had been drafted by a legally-minded spouse. It set out the agreement of the division of the estate 3 and updated Captain Sutherland on the current whereabouts of the Walker deed-box. Shibden Hall Saturday 13 June 1835 My dear Captain Sutherland, I
relationships: with her Aunt Anne, her sister Marian, her father and with the servants at Shibden Hall; with Ann Walker, of course, plus her key relatives—her ‘Cliff-hill’ aunt, and her Sutherland sister and brother-in-law; and with their relatives among the key Tory élite families—notably the Priestleys, Edwards and Rawsons; with crucial male professionals like her lawyers (Robert Parker in Halifax, the Grays in York) and other key skilled advisers, notably Samuel Washington her estate steward and James Holt her coal steward; with key tenants over her estate (though her
. Why do I so revere the pride of ancestry? Because how rarely, how very rarely we see nobility of mind among the lowly born!’ 7 While with her cosmopolitan York friends she was able to be more open about her ‘oddity’, in provincial Halifax she had to be much more discreet. So how was her singularity perceived there? Now she was a Lister of Shibden Hall, her friends were increasingly drawn from the local élite: the ancient Waterhouse family; the Priestleys, old-established wool
visits to her elderly aunt living nearby at Cliff Hill, Ann had left Crow Nest for Shibden Hall and the Listers. Yet her extended family – the Priestleys, the Rawsons and the Edwards – felt they should keep a watchful eye on what Anne Lister might be planning and plotting up at Shibden. It might be a marriage for Anne and even Ann, but it was of course a ‘marriage’ recognized by neither Church nor state, nor indeed by society. So, from the 1832 courtship and seduction, and the 1834 betrothal and marriage, followed shortly by Ann Walker's moving to
If old-fashioned Shibden Hall, little changed since its sixteenth-century heyday, evoked the old manorial past, then Halifax's classical Georgian architecture conjured up the rising mercantile and manufacturing élite. Few local families epitomised this new commercial self-confidence more acutely than the Walkers. Ann Walker, born in 1803, grew up in one such house, visiting her relatives in others. The key architect was John Carr of York, whose magnificent mansions included Harewood House near Leeds and Wentworth Woodhouse near Sheffield. His
see her younger niece Marian. It was Anne she had always favoured, and it remained Anne who could control her sister's visit. F riday 30 No kiss … Letter to Miss Marian Lister, Market Weighton. ‘Shibden Hall Fri 30 Sept 1836. My dear Marian – my aunt has got over the night better than we expected; but it does not seem probable that she can continue many days. She speaks with difficulty … & appears anxious to be as little disturbed as possible. With regard to your coming over … I
. Luncheon at 2 – sat with A~ & M~ till 3, when A~ rode to Cliff Hill, & M~ & I went out, but did not get much beyond the barn in consequence of a heavy shower. M~ strongly advised me last night not to change the name from Shibden Hall to Shibden Castle. Mentioned Mr A~'s magnificent new house in the old style called ‘castle’ & which (in ridicule) the people called ‘the castle in the field’. 6 Said I was struck by what she (M~) said, and would not change the name without well considering the matter. M
in the new sprawling West Riding county constituency. Lying just beyond the borough boundary, Shibden Hall and the bulk of the Lister estate was thus firmly identified as rural not urban. And this is how we can best understand Anne Lister in the 1830s: living on the very margins of the industrialising town—but distinctly not of it. Electoral politics further sharpened Anne's distance from Whiggish urban manufacturers like the Akroyds. Naturally at the December 1832 general election she supported Halifax borough's ‘Blue’ candidate, the