Saturday, August 28, 2010

My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue

Portrait of Anne Lister


My hero: 

Anne Lister 

by Emma Donoghue 

'She had the sexual ethics of a bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy. But she also looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there with unflinching precision'

Emma Donoghue
Saturdady 28 August 2010

My hero is not exactly heroic. There's nothing noble about Anne Lister (1791-1840) except in the technical sense of being "well born": she inherited Shibden Hall in Yorkshire from her uncle. Lister's less-than-noble attitudes are revealed in the 4m-word diary she kept, various selections from which have been edited by Helena Whitbread and Jill Liddington. (Whitbread's initial volume – which Virago is about to reissue – inspired me so much that I adapted it into my first play, I Know My Own Heart.) A stern snob who bullied her tenants into voting Tory, Lister despised women who were not ancient-Greek-spouting intellectuals like herself.

She also had the sexual ethics of a bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy. Why is Lister my hero, then? Because she looked into her heart and wrote about what she found there with unflinching precision. "I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs," she acknowledged on 29 October 1820. At a time when it was hard for genteel women to admit to any sexual drive at all, let alone one that caused them to fantasise about having "connection" with servant girls in huts, Lister faced the truth of her swaggering sapphism head on, and put it all down in the coded passages that make up about a sixth of her diary: the one place she told no lies.

Not only did Lister ignore her culture's rules about whom she should sleep with, she scorned the other rules of womanhood, too. Always dressed mannishly in black (and called "Gentleman Jack" by the locals), she remodelled Shibden estate, ran a colliery, was the first woman to climb several peaks in the Pyrenees, and finally formed a canny marriage of convenience and paired up with a neighbouring heiress. Not a saint, then, but a woman who seized her freedoms rather than waiting for anyone to grant them to her.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)