Search results
"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.
This book is a social history of northern soul. It examines the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices, by locating it in the shifting economic and social contexts of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. The popularity of northern soul emerged in a period when industrial working-class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. The book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, popular music and everyday life in post-war Britain. The authors draw on an expansive range of sources including magazines/fanzines, diaries, letters, and a comprehensive oral history project to produce a detailed, analytical and empathetic reading of an aspect of working-class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young men and women in the 1970s. A range of voices appear throughout the book to highlight the complexity of the role of class, race and gender, locality and how such identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dance floors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel (Manchester), the Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), the Catacombs (Wolverhampton) and the Casino (Wigan).
writings predictably say far more about male tenants than female) and with the men who regularly worked for her, like Charles Howarth the joiner; and, away from Halifax, with intimate female friends, especially Mariana Lawton and Isabella Norcliffe, plus newer correspondents like Lady Stuart. In the mid-1830s Anne wrote roughly one-tenth of the diaries in her letter-by-letter secret code: and the main handwritten sections are particularly hard to read. 4 (See illustration p.40
Anne Lister's diaries run to just under five million words. 1 Roughly one sixth was written in her secret code. The journals start as brief schoolgirl diaries in 1806, growing to their fullest in the late 1830s. In addition, there are also other key archival sources for 1836–38. Most important are Anne's letters, here written to her titled women friends. She used her correspondence as we might use Facebook or Twitter: to present an outward-facing persona to the elite world. Because these 1836
, and Ann Walker's inconvenient relatives – such as the Rawsons down in Halifax, who knew Anne's reputation of old. The secluded moss hut would surely provide a conveniently intimate female space for courtship. Anne set about wooing and seducing with impressive energy. However, while she was certain of her own sexuality and its God-given nature, Ann was much more conventional and was wracked by religious guilt. Yet Anne was coolly persistent and persuasive. She wrote all the details of the courtship in her diary, mainly of course in her secret code
student for it will remain with you for the rest of your career. Writing and reading are inextricably linked elements of the craft. The point of writing anything is to make it available for reading; even secret codes are meant to be read by someone. Improving your own writing will be greatly improved if you read widely and, as you do so, think about the way authors have crafted the books and articles you study. Reading and reflecting on how you read is integral to continuing to develop the craft of writing. On this note, it is primarily for convenience that
relationships. Eliza also kept a diary and it seems that by 1808 the two girls had together evolved a secret code in which to record their affair: this developed all the intimacy of a marriage, with Eliza referring to Anne as ‘my husband’. 1 Cosmopolitan York had indeed opened up a new and enticing world to Anne: new ideas, new intellectual interests, new friends—the grand Norcliffes of Langton, 2 and the Belcombes, a doctor's family in
controlled and they may not use any secret code, although it is now becoming common for such vessels to carry cryptographic equipment, 58 and, if the gravity of the circumstances requires, they may be detained for up to seven days. Neutral observers may be put on board to ensure that the provisions of the Convention are observed. 59 Protection ceases if they commit any hostile act against
’s Kim (1901), in which the eponymous boy-hero is inducted into a world of infinitely cunning disguises, near-miraculous subtleties in the transmission of intelligence, and epochal confrontations between the British and Russian empire taking place in absolute secrecy. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands , coming out at the same time, proposed a secret code for the command of naval power between Britain and Germany
. She’s not going to talk to herself. I’m fucked. It did not occur to him to add characters to the scene; instead Milch knew that ‘This is what I started, this is what I have to finish. The only trouble is I can’t.’ And then somehow he writes in Mrs Lydell’s voice: I got the phone call that my son Judgy is dead, and then I felt that I should clean the floor, so I was cleaning the floor, I tried to scrub in multiples of four and then my mind went away. And then a voice said to me, ‘Don’t you understand what I have been trying to explain to you in secret code.’ And I