For #LGBTHistoryMonth I will be posting a #womaninhistory every day. Today is Anne Lister an English landowner, business woman, intrepid traveller, mountaineer and diarist from Halifax, West Yorkshire who is sometimes described as ‘the first modern lesbian’.

Lister was renowned for only dressing in dark clothing and rebelling against the strict gender stereotypes of her time. She was known to locals as ‘Gentleman Jack’. Throughout her life, Lister kept extensive diaries that chronicled the details of her daily life including her lesbian relationships, her financial concerns, her industrial activities, and her work improving Shibden Hall. They provide an insight into shows a network of relationships between women of the gentry and aristocracy in early 19th-century Halifax and beyond.

Sections of her diaries concerning the intimate details of her romantic and sexual relationships were written in code derived from a combination of algebra and Ancient Greek. These were deciphered in the 1930s and have shaped and continue to shape the direction of UK Gender Studies and Women’s History.