"Anne Lister (1791-1840) was a wealthy landowner who resided in Shibden Hall near Halifax. Lister is often referred to as the first modern lesbian for living an openly lesbian lifestyle, and is best remembered as a lesbian diarist.

Her journals (1806-1840) run to an extraordinary four million words about three times the length of Samuel Pepys's diaries. About one-sixth of these four million words are written in Anne's private code, comprising of letters from Greek and algebra, and mainly record her romantic and sexual affairs with other women.

Academics Jill Liddington and Alison Oram revisit the dramatic transmission story of how the diaries survived since Anne's death in 1840 in the remote Caucasus Mountains, and how the secret code was eventually cracked. She discusses how Anne Lister ran her life in the 1830s once she came into power at Shibden, and analyzes her 1834 same-sex partnership ceremonies with Ann Walker, a neighbouring heiress."