The Secret Code Anne Lister Invented to Write About Sex
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Anne Lister kept a diary for 25 years, and by the time she died in 1840 it ran to roughly five million words across 26 volumes, dwarfing even Samuel Pepys' famous journal by a factor of four. Most of it reads like any other 19th-century gentrywoman's record: the weather, her coal business, calls paid and received. About a sixth of it isn't like that at all. Woven through the ordinary entries is a private code of her own invention, and inside that code is one of the most detailed first-person records of lesbian life and seduction to survive from the period, hidden in plain sight on the page for over a century before anyone could actually read it.
A Code Built for a Teenage Girlfriend
Lister started the code around 1808, when she was about 17 and boarding at the Manor School in York, where she'd begun a relationship with a fellow pupil named Eliza Raine. The earliest private passages were written simply in Greek, itself an effective enough disguise in a world where few people, and even fewer women, could read it. Over time Lister expanded the system into something far more elaborate: a substitution cipher mixing Greek letters, algebraic notation, punctuation marks and symbols borrowed from the zodiac, written with no spaces or punctuation of its own so that it read as a dense, continuous block of symbols. She called it her "crypthand," and she trusted it completely. No key was ever found among her papers. As far as Lister was concerned, she'd taken the secret of how to read it to her grave.
What the Code Was Actually Protecting
The code wasn't hiding gossip or household accounts. It was hiding a genuinely explicit record of Lister's sex life, relationship politics and seduction technique, written with a frankness that would have been startling even in code. She described orgasms in her entries as "kisses," or simply marked them with a small cross in the margin.
One decoded passage from 1819, describing a night with her lover Marianna Belcombe, walks through undressing, getting into bed together, and a satisfying encounter that left both women quickly composed again once interrupted by a knock at the door, the kind of practical, unromanticised detail, right down to the timing, that makes the diaries read less like a love letter and more like a field record. Lister also used the code to track her own methods. One recurring tactic, according to researchers who've studied the diaries closely, was to casually bring up classical writers touching on homosexuality, Sappho above all, then watch a woman's face closely for any flicker of recognition or discomfort before deciding whether to press further. She'd follow up with what she called "accidental" touches, a hand on a knee, a lingering embrace, framed as harmless affection until she was sure of her footing. It was patient, deliberate work, and the diaries record her running the same routine on a long list of women, sometimes multiple sisters in the same family within the space of a few years.
Her first real love, Eliza Raine, the girl she'd invented the code with in the first place, was left behind entirely once Lister moved on to other affairs, and by most accounts suffered a serious mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Lister's most enduring relationship was with Marianna Belcombe, later Marianna Lawton, whom she met through a mutual friend, Isabella Norcliffe, in 1812. Marianna married a wealthy older landowner named Charles Lawton for money in 1816, reportedly while Lister begged her on her knees not to go through with it, yet the two women's affair continued on and off for years afterward, complicated in the 1820s by a venereal infection Lister believed she'd contracted from Marianna, who'd caught it from her own husband, and which Lister then apparently passed along to another lover entirely. Isabella Norcliffe, the friend who'd introduced them, spent the rest of her life single and never fully forgave herself for the introduction. Lister's final and most consequential relationship was with Ann Walker, a wealthy neighbouring heiress she began courting in the early 1830s using the same patient methods she'd refined over two decades, eventually persuading Walker to move into Shibden Hall with her in 1834 in what the two women privately treated as a marriage, exchanging rings and taking communion together at a York church, even though no law of the time recognised any such thing.
Lister wasn't operating in total isolation either. In 1822 she made a pilgrimage of her own to visit the Ladies of Llangollen, the two Irish gentlewomen who'd eloped together decades earlier and built a quiet, tolerated life together in rural Wales. Lister came away thoroughly unconvinced by the pair's carefully maintained public fiction that their relationship was merely a close friendship, writing in her diary afterward that she couldn't help thinking it wasn't Platonic at all. It's one of the earliest surviving instances of one queer woman looking at another queer relationship and simply refusing to accept the polite cover story built to protect it.
Found in an Attic, Nearly Burned
After Lister's sudden death from a fever in 1840, while travelling in the Georgian region of the Caucasus, the diaries passed down through the family and eventually ended up stored behind wood panelling at Shibden Hall, the estate she'd inherited and run herself as a businesswoman, complete with her own coal-mining operations, a career that ran alongside her love life rather than instead of it. They sat there for decades until John Lister, a distant relative and the last Lister to actually live at Shibden, rediscovered them in 1887. He began quoting from the plain-text sections in the local Halifax newspaper, carefully steering around the coded passages he couldn't read.
Sometime between 1887 and 1892, curiosity got the better of him. Working with a friend, the antiquarian Arthur Burrell, John Lister finally cracked the cipher using a single scrap of paper on which Anne had, for once, mixed code with ordinary handwriting: the phrase "In God is my hope," with only the word "hope" written in cipher. Burrell later recalled realising the first and last letters had to be H and E, and working outward from there. What the two men found once they'd broken the code alarmed them enough that Burrell advised burning the diaries outright, worried about the scandal and, in an era just a few years removed from Oscar Wilde's trials, the very real legal danger that public knowledge could bring down on the Lister name, even though the law in question only criminalised sex between men. John Lister couldn't bring himself to do it. He hid the diaries back behind the panelling, and when he died in 1933 without ever making his knowledge of the code public, it looked for a while like the secret might die with him too.
The Decades-Long Wait to Be Read
Lister had left Shibden Hall and its grounds to the Halifax Corporation before his death, and the diaries turned up again during a records survey. A librarian named Muriel Green spent time working through the papers in the 1930s, and a researcher named Vivien Ingham studied Lister's life and her Pyrenean mountaineering exploits in the 1960s, but the code itself remained unbroken publicly. It wasn't until Arthur Burrell, by then in his eighties, finally handed over a full description of how the cipher worked that the way was properly cleared. In the 1980s, historian Helena Whitbread began the long work of transcribing the coded volumes in full, and her 1988 book, I Know My Own Heart, was the first time the explicit material Lister had spent her life carefully concealing reached a general readership, nearly a century and a half after she'd written it and roughly a hundred years after two Victorian men first sat up decoding it by lamplight and quietly decided the world wasn't ready.
The diaries were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2011, and Lister's life was dramatised for television in Sally Wainwright's Gentleman Jack. It's a very different kind of secrecy from the one explored decades later in the trial of Radclyffe Hall, whose own account of lesbian life was hauled into a courtroom and physically destroyed the moment it became public. Lister's crypthand did the opposite job. Rather than a novel written for an audience and then suppressed, it was a private record never meant to be read by anyone at all, protected so effectively by its own author that it took two separate generations of strangers, working nearly a century apart, to finally break it open.
