by Anne Choma
The fact that Anne and Ann had plans to meet for breakfast the next morning gives a twist to an otherwise unremarkable anecdote. It seems unlikely that the return of the volumes might not simply have waited until then. It is tempting to speculate that it was a desire of Ann Walker’s to establish further communication with Anne Lister before their next meeting that prompted her to send her servant to Shibden, more than any impatience to read her books.
Either way, the visit from James Mackenzie gave Anne Lister an opportunity to further her cause. The language of her return note operated within the romantic conventions of the day. She told Anne that she had ‘played truant’ by staying longer than she had intended at Lidgate. The visit had given her ‘so much to think of afterwards, that is long after I have actually left you’. It was the Georgian equivalent of texting your date afterwards, to tell them you’ve had a good time.
Breakfast at Lidgate the next morning was served just after 7.30am. Anne Lister was used to early mornings and had already been up and about for some time. Her breakfasts at Shibden, usually just bread and milk, were frequently taken after hours of physical work on the land, or a trip into Halifax. At Lidgate, she was greeted with a more formal spread. After eating, she and Ann Walker ‘adjourned’ to another room.
Anne’s supreme confidence in company served her well when two of Miss Walker’s relatives paid an unexpected social call. Mrs Stansfield Rawson and her daughter Delia Rawson, of Gledholt, might reasonably have expected Anne to retreat politely to Shibden on their arrival at Lidgate. Indeed, Anne noted that they ‘looked odd on finding me here’ in the first place. However, having waited in the wings for the three weeks of Miss Walker’s visit to Wastwater, Anne was not about to let her visit be cut short. She stepped self-assuredly into the role of joint hostess. While the Rawsons appreciated the opportunity to become ‘better acquainted’ with her, they recognised well that she had determined to outstay them. They were no match for her stamina, and eventually returned to Huddersfield. Ann Walker told Anne that she was ‘glad’ of it.
Anne’s visit continued into the afternoon. After lunch, she suggested to Miss Walker that they might stroll the three or so miles back to Shibden for a tour of her elegant new walk and recently finished moss hut. ‘Walked slowly by the new road and Lower Brea, and sauntered to nearly Hall Wood gate in my walk’ she wrote later, ‘then on returning rested in the hut and must have sat there a couple of hours’ (27TH SEPTEMBER 1832).
Miss Walker was the first person to be invited inside Anne’s chaumière. Located a good distance below Shibden Hall, close to the babble of the Red Beck brook, it was both privately and romantically situated, offering the perfect space for the advancement of their fledgling courtship. This was no coincidence; Anne’s chaumière was the realisation of a long-held dream of creating a space in which she could discreetly entertain women. As a much younger woman, she had fantasised about frolicking in sheds with her conquests. She had already decided that she ‘would pay due court’ to Miss Walker in the moss hut.
Miss Walker was duly enchanted. ‘She sat in the moss house, hardly liking to move. Of course I made myself agreeable, and I think she likes me even more than she herself is aware,’ wrote Anne.
Anne took advantage of this mood to enter into the subject of travelling together. In previous conversations, Miss Walker had wondered if Anne’s tentative propositions of foreign travel had been ‘all a joke’. Now, Anne hoped that Miss Walker ‘would understand that I was more serious than she supposed’. Her endeavours appeared to be successful, and the conversation took a decidedly romantic turn. ‘We laughed at the idea of the talk our going abroad would [make]’, wrote Anne in that evening’s long crypt-hand diary entry. ‘She said it would be as good as a marriage. “Yes,” said [I] “Quite as good or better”.’
It was more than Anne Lister had dared hope. The timid Miss Walker had uttered the word marriage, and Anne’s mind was working at a hundred miles an hour. ‘She falls into my views admirably,’ she wrote, ‘I believe I shall succeed with her, and if I do, I will really try to make her happy.’
After the disaster of Vere and protracted disillusionment of Mariana, Anne felt herself ‘set at liberty’ to love again. The tide, it seemed, was beginning to turn in her favour. Life could be curious:
How strange the fate of things, if after all, my companion for life should be Miss Walker. She was nine and twenty a little while ago. How little my aunt or anyone suspects what I am about.
27TH SEPTEMBER 1832
The future looked to be full of surprises. Anne thanked merciful heaven ‘for bringing me home’.
CHAPTER 5
Early Warning Signs and Sexual Confidence
‘I think we should be happy together – I should gently lead her into my own ways and soon be really attached to her – to the exclusion of all care for anyone else’
Mariana Lawton could little have predicted that shy Miss Walker would be the woman to finally dethrone her in Anne’s affections, though it would be months before she would discover the nature of Anne and Ann’s deepening relationship. Anne’s attraction to Miss Walker was, in part, a reaction against how manipulated she had felt during her on-off relationship with Mariana. Of the nearly twenty years the two women had been involved with each other, Anne would later write, ‘The history of her acquaintance may be summed in, she accepted, refused, accepted, married, offended, refused, repented’ (16TH MARCH 1834).
In Ann Walker, Anne found a refreshing lack of worldliness. Unlike Mariana, or Vere, Ann Walker was uncritical. She looked up to Anne, and took her affection at face value. She was not bothered by the unusual way Anne dressed, or how she curled her hair, or the ‘mannish’ way in which she walked. Mariana had frequently expressed her embarrassment at being seen with Anne in public; Ann Walker never would.
In turn, Anne Lister believed that it was within her power to fulfil Ann Walker emotionally. She was keen to take on responsibility for her happiness, ‘that she shall have no reason to repent’. Though she recognised that her match with Miss Walker did not represent a meeting of intellect, confidence or even physical energy, she perceived that their partnership could be a loving one. Her relationship with Mariana had been fraught, her pursuit of Vere had been messy. In Ann Walker, Anne Lister saw someone with whom she might share a life of uncomplicated and mutual affection.
By the end of September 1832, Miss Walker had accepted Anne’s invitation to travel abroad with her. For Anne Lister, there was some pleasure in the idea that their plan must be kept private. Secrets, she knew, could be seductive:
Our liaison is now established – it is to be named to nobody but her sister and aunt and my aunt, and that not till a week or ten days before our being off. We shall go on swimmingly, and our courtship will progress naturally – she already likes me – perhaps she scarce knows how. We shall both be in love seriously enough before our journey.
28TH SEPTEMBER 1832
At the prospect of the travel plan, Anne redoubled her efforts to ingratiate herself with the wider Walker family. On 29th September she turned her charm on the Priestleys. Dropping in at New House en route to Lidgate, she was ‘friendly, open and consulting’ to William, and flattered Eliza with the news that people in Halifax had been talking about what a ‘fascinating person’ she was.
Having accomplished one objective, Anne walked the half a mile to Ann Walker’s house. From the diary entry she made that night, it appears to have been an extraordinary day:
We now get on beautifully . . . In moralizing a little on how much we had both to be thankful for, how happy we should be, etc. She said, ‘yes, she had often looked at all her things and said what was the use of having them with nobody to enjoy them with her?’
She said it all now seemed like a dream to her. I told her I had made up my mind in May, the moment I was at liberty to do so, so that it had been well enough digested by me, however sudden i
t might seem to her, and that I gave my happiness into her keeping in perfect security. Said I had built the hut on purpose for her.
29TH SEPTEMBER 1832
In fact, Anne had not built the hut for Miss Walker, but it was a timely piece of flattery. The level of feeling between the two women was moving, emphatically, beyond the bounds of common friendship.
However, while it marked a confident step forward for their intimacy, their conversation also signified choppy waters ahead. The lack of self-confidence, wavering commitment to travel and initial reaction against the idea of inhabiting Shibden Hall – all of which Ann Walker demonstrated – would, in the coming months, constitute significant obstacles to the future of her relationship with Anne Lister.
For now, Anne was content to dismiss them. She chose to interpret Miss Walker’s admission that she ‘had been thinking last night whether she could make me happy and be a companion for me’ as sensitivity, rather than low self-esteem. To Miss Walker’s suggestion that they delay their plan to travel until after the visit of her friends Mr and Mrs Ainsworth – ‘she wishes not to put them off, and all other things suiting, would rather not go till February’ – Anne simply agreed. In fact, she said, the extra month would put her mind at rest and allow her to spend more time with her ailing aunt. About Miss Walker’s reluctance to engage with the idea of eventually moving away from Lidgate Anne appeared relaxed. She privately conceded that it had been ‘too early in our day to mention’ her plan for Miss Walker to let out her property and move into Shibden. At this stage, she was happy to have planted the thought in Miss Walker’s mind.
Anne’s nous verons approach to Miss Walker’s insecurities and procrastinations suggests that she saw and heard what suited her in the early stage of the courtship. She remained typically confident that, in time, she would ‘gently mould Miss W to my wishes’ (27TH SEPTEMBER 1832).
Whilst maintaining, thus far, a level of secrecy regarding her sexual orientation, Anne had opened up to Miss Walker about herself in other ways. Within her first visits to Lidgate, she had spoken in depth on the subjects closest to her, bearing her soul on the topics of education, travel, family and home.
But in the early autumn of 1832, there was still much for Anne Lister to discover about Miss Walker. She did not know whether or not Ann had ever had an intimate relationship, but assumed that Ann was sexually inexperienced, which reinforced her instinct that she must tread sensitively and carefully. ‘I see I must be uncommonly and fastidiously delicate,’ she would write on 1st October. As September drew to a close she was astonished at her own progress:
We are in smooth waters now, and she tells me more and more of her affairs. She feels at ease and happier with me than perhaps she could easily explain, and probably we shall both be impatient by and by to be off. I myself am surprised at my so rapid success.
28TH SEPTEMBER 1832
Now, as Anne returned home late, having spent the entire afternoon and evening with Miss Walker, Marian took the opportunity to air her irritation at what she considered Anne’s selfishness:
My aunt has been miserable about my being out so late, and Marian set on my entering the room, that I must do so no more, in that sort of to me dictatorial manner, that I as usual could not stand it, and it ending in Marian’s crying and having a nervous fit.
29TH SEPTEMBER 1832
While this account paints Marian as an hysteric, the truth is that she and her aunt had every right to be concerned for Anne’s welfare. Crime was not confined to the urban slums of Halifax; pockets of lawlessness existed all over the Calder Valley, and the road that led from Lightcliffe to Shibden was particularly dark and secluded.
Knowing this, Aunt Anne and Marian had taken the step of dispatching Eliza Cordingley and Rachel Hemingway into the night to find their mistress. By the time she returned in their escort, the whole house was up and about.
But Marian’s fury could not detract from the excitement Anne felt following the events of the day. She turned to her aunt with her hopes for the new relationship:
Telling her of my real sentiments about Miss Walker and my expectations, that the chances were ten to one in favour of our travelling and ultimately settling together. My aunt not to appear to know anything about it, even to Miss W [Ann Walker’s aunt], till I had mentioned it to the latter.
29TH SEPTEMBER 1832
Anne had been confident of her aunt’s approval and indeed, the elder Anne Lister admitted that the idea of the match had already crossed her mind. She ‘seemed very well pleased at my choice and prospects’, wrote Anne, and ‘thought my father would be pleased if he knew, and so would both my uncles’. Just as it would have if the match had been a heterosexual one, Ann Walker’s well-publicised fortune played its part in the enthusiasm of Anne’s family: ‘I said she had three thousand a year or very near it.’
The genteel femininity that attracted Anne to Miss Walker as a prospective sexual partner was also a part of what made her acceptable to Anne’s family. Ann Walker was highly respectable. She fitted neatly into her period’s received ideal of womanhood, of the image of ‘proper lady’ as depicted in contemporary conduct manuals. She exercised her wealth and influence in a manner befitting of her sex, by showing regard for the needs of the less fortunate. She was the right kind of woman, and would be made welcome at Shibden.
Meanwhile, Anne’s thinking was less genteel. Her sexual fantasies about Miss Walker – from which she ‘incurred a cross’ in the early hours of 30th September – were increasingly frequent and meticulously logged.
At nine o’clock that morning, Dr Kenny called to see Aunt Anne, who was still suffering from painful spasms. He thought her ‘state precarious’, recorded Anne, whose medical interest prompted her to dog his every move, ‘but ten days will show the effect of the combination of alternatives he has now given her’. Anne’s lack of faith in Dr Kenny was compounded by Miss Walker’s recent confidences about his unwanted attentions, as well as the fact that he had, a short time ago, been seen arm-in-arm with none other than Marian.
Anne remained preoccupied with Marian’s reaction to her late return from Lightcliffe the previous night. She had slept on it, and decided that she still found Marian ridiculous. During the resulting row that afternoon, Marian threatened that ‘she would go away’. Anne resolved to ‘never mention Marian in any way to anyone’ in the future.
After Dr Kenny had left, Anne turned her attention to her correspondence. She appealed to Mrs Norcliffe to help her find a replacement for George Playforth, who had died that June, before moving on to a general update:
Ask if Bell is really to marry Dr Travis’s younger brother . . . ask if Burnett got the parcel I sent her ages ago . . . ask if Richard the groom at Langton, knows of a good groom who could act as footman and likely to be at liberty in January – almost determined to take an English groom, and a courier too.
Nothing would delight me more than to go to Langton now, but can’t, for business – my steward died ten days ago, and my aunt had been so far from well this last fortnight, that I should be uneasy to leave her . . . all pleased with my friend’s marriage with Lochiel . . . mention that the younger children are now to take the rank as if their father had come to take the title.
30TH SEPTEMBER 1832
Anne’s second letter was to Eugenie Pierre’s sister. To Miss Pierre, who was working as a teacher at Mrs Swinley’s School in Brighton, she reiterated her exacting requirements for a lady’s maid:
I want a clever lady’s maid who is at the same time thoroughly respectable and steady, obliging in her manner, neat in her person and habits, who has good health, and is sufficiently fond of travelling to make the best of everything, and have no objection to go outside, or to go to wherever I may wish.
If your sister is such a person, and if, as Mrs Lawton seems persuaded, she has really profited by many advantages of birth and weather, I
feel certain that she would, in a very short time, understand my habits and wishes, and find her place as comfortable as it would be in my power to make it.
Eugenie had, indirectly, been warned. Anne’s maid would have to do more than cut her hair, prepare her food and mend her clothes; she would be expected to interpret every one of her mistress’s complex wishes, and quickly.
‘She said she had thought of me every day at Wastwater, and could not help thinking now of the very great anxiety she somehow felt to get home again. She had always an idea that her thirtieth year would be an important one’
Anne’s chaumière had proven a worthwhile investment. Within only a few weeks of its completion, she and Miss Walker were visiting the moss hut on an almost daily basis. It provided a romantic sanctuary among the otherwise utilitarian, and still scruffy, grounds. Cows, to Anne’s chagrin, were liable to break through the neighbouring Calf Croft and reap destruction on the rest of the land. They had, she had written, ‘cropt [sic] to destruction’ her ‘fine young lime tree and a fine arbutus and several young oaks’ on 7th September.
Outside the thatched hut, Anne had other preoccupations. She began to make plans in earnest for an access road from the Godley turnpike on the perimeter of the estate grounds. Pickles was costing it, so Anne recorded his calculations in her diary for subsequent perusal and cross-checking.
Tensions with her sister had been temporarily calmed by Marian’s decision to go and stay in Market Weighton, a town sixty miles away. Before she departed by the 11am Highflier on 1st October, Anne had the good grace to wish her a pleasant journey. She hoped that Marian’s holiday would clear the air and improve her mood.
