ABSTRACT
Lesbian history has characteristically been represented as one of silence, discontinuity and absence. This chapter examines the significance of a study of Anne Lister, an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire woman, in articulating aspects of that elusive history. In 1975, Adrienne Rich drew attention to the ‘silence and lies’ by which ‘women’s love for women’ has been suppressed (Rich 1980:190). Recent lesbian scholarship has gone a long way towards revealing some of those hidden connections and secrets. Lillian Faderman transformed notions of romantic friendship in her 1981 survey of love between women, Surpassing the Love of Men, arguing that the eighteenth-century fashion ‘dictated that women may fall in love with each other’ (Faderman 1991:74). She concluded, however, that ‘most love relationships between women during previous eras…were less physical than they are in our times’ (Faderman 1991:19). She had not had the benefit of reading the first published transcription of Anne Lister’s coded diary, Helena Whitbread’s, I Know My Own Heart (1988), which Emma Donoghue, Ros Ballaster and Martha Vicinus draw on in their later studies. In Passions Between Women (1993), Donoghue notes an occasional tendency among historians of lesbian history to mythologize and thus perhaps reinforce the silence identified by Rich (Donoghue 1993:3), while Ballaster suggests that Lister’s ‘understanding of her own lesbian sexuality…indicates a continuing “underground” tradition for women who desired other women’ (Ballaster 1995:28). Martha Vicinus, observing that ‘conceptual confusion is perhaps inevitable in regard to lesbians, given the historical suppression of female sexuality in general’, echoes Rich’s earlier warning that lesbian history consists largely of ‘nuances, masks, secrecy, and the unspoken’ (Vicinus 1996:235).
