ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author aims to draw attention to the way in which she also used texts widely available to women during this period, such as Campbell's The Pleasures of Hope, to signal affection, friendship or sexual interest in other women. Because recent work on Lister's reading written within a lesbian identity' framework seems unable to describe the complexity of Lister's various reading strategies that will situate Lister's fondness for Classical and Romantic writing within her broader reading practices, which included making notes from travel books and searching for information that would allow her to be an effective manager of the Shibden estate. It pays particular attention to Lister's use of extracts and quotations from both literary texts and letters, as well as her frequent use of the book as gift, in order to suggest that she was a particularly subversive reader of texts which circulated as part of the mainstream culture of the late Romantic period.
