Anne Lister's diaries and gendered attitudes towards long-eighteenth century travel

Anne Lister's diaries, kept between 1816-1840, have been the subject of a significant amount of attention since Helena Whitbread's discovery and partial decoding thereof in the early 1980s.

Most extant scholarship focuses on Lister's status as an early female entrepreneur and as 'the first modern British lesbian.' This places Lister amongst a much wider demographic of long-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century woman writers who are categorised as part of a 'feminist tradition' rather than as writers or contributors to the emergent public sphere, and whose works are not read in their context so much as they are judged by their adherence to contemporary ideologies and identity markers.

Whilst Lister's significance to lesbian history should not be undermined, an insistent focus on the 'lesbian-specificity' of her narrative has perhaps resulted in a reductive interpretation of the complex identity and social moment her diaries exemplify and contribute to.

One particularly understudied aspect of Lister's writing is her recording of health struggles as both a genuine incentive and apparent excuse to travel abroad.

This thesis seeks to analyse Lister's relationship to travel, health tourism, and literature as one that exemplifies the conscious manipulation of the newly emerged public and private spheres, and of early modern ideas surrounding both female fragility and masculine women, to express an individually queer life.