Anne Lister and Lesbian Desire in Charlotte Brontë’sShirley

Abstract

During the winter of 1838-39, Emily Brontë lived close to Shibden Hall, whose owner was Anne Lister. Lister's diaries reveal numerous sexual and romantic relationships with women, including her 'marriage' to Ann Walker. While critics and historians have speculated about the connection between Anne Lister and Emily, no consideration has been given to the connection between Charlotte Brontë's novel, Shirley, and Anne Lister's life, despite obvious similarities and the likelihood that Charlotte knew of Lister. Like Shirley Keeldar, Lister was a Yorkshire landowner, who adopted a masculine persona and was attracted to a weaker, more feminine woman. But we do not suggest a crude cause-and-effect between Lister's life and Charlotte Brontë's novel. Instead, it is more appropriate to read Lister's diaries as chronicling ideas and attitudes that were part of Charlotte's world and which open up readings of Shirley which would, before the discovery of Lister's diaries, be anachronistic. In this way, Lister's text allows a more explicitly sexual interpretation of female relationships in Charlotte's novel.

Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

“…A cluster of three works published from 2006 to 2008 are particularly noteworthy as scholarship issuing from gender studies research of the prior three decades. Anne Longmuir's Brontë Studies essay on the influence of Anne Lister on Shirley influences and is cited by Berg. Longmuir's interpretation focuses upon the connections between Lister and Charlotte's life and work rather than Emily's – including Charlotte's intensely close relationship with her Roe Head School friend Ellen Nussey.…”

'Pray don't forget me my sweet little thing': Charlotte Brontë's Relationship with Ann Cook

“…21 Elaine Miller also suggests that the intense rhetoric characteristic of the letters between Charlotte and Ellen Nussey combined with Arthur Nicholls's jealousy of their friendship might indicate that their relationship had a whiff of the erotic that may have disconcerted Charlotte's rather puritanical spouse. 22 Whether or not homosexual acts, or what Faderman calls 'genital' sex, were a common element of the deep friendships between nineteenth-century women, Sharon Marcus argues that Victorian women lived in a world of 'everyday homoeroticism' in that the fashion magazines they constantly consulted drew upon pornography's homo-and hetero-erotic linguistic and artistic tropes.…”