In 2019, the diaries of Anne Lister exploded on to the screen in the form of Gentleman Jack, the BBC/HBO series starring Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle and directed by the award-winning Sally Wainwright. Season one, which focuses on the period of Lister’s relationship with Ann Walker, with whom Lister privately sealed a union in Holy Trinity church in York, attracted six million viewers. Season two aired in April 2022 and a BBC One documentary, Gentleman Jack Changed My Life, also aired in May 2022.1 As the BBC documentary title suggests, Gentleman Jack has generated a devoted queer and lesbian fanbase, many of whom have claimed the series has transformed their lives.
Through a queer temporality framework, this chapter analyses the effects of the Lister diaries’ transition from scholarly archive to mainstream entertainment culture. Gentleman Jack has already given rise to scholarly articles and in The Gentleman Jack Effect: Lessons in Breaking Rules and Living Out Loud (2021), Janet Lea has gathered testimonies from viewers whose lives have been radically transformed by watching season one.2 Fans have also responded to the show on Twitter and Tumblr, and in 2019, Diva published a detailed article by another of the show’s early fans, Rachel Biggs, where she describes how deeply the series affected her.3 By exploring such responses to Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks what gains and losses are involved in terms of our relationship to the queer past by translating the Lister archive into the sphere of popular culture.
In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that adaptations have always existed – at least from the classical period onwards – and that they are far from being a ‘minor and subsidiary’ genre that can never live up to the original.4 She conceptualises adaptation not as a copy, but rather as an ‘oscillation’, a ‘re-mediation’ and a form of translation between the source text and its reworking.5 As with translation, adaptation ‘has its own aura’ and creates its own resonances;6 borrowing from Walter Benjamin, Hutcheon argues that adaptation, like translation, ‘is an engagement with the original text that makes us see the text in different ways’.7 In other words, adaptation is less a copy of the original than a reinvention and a reimagining of the source text in an ever-evolving present. While adaptation can range in terms of its political register, it is always responding to its historical moment.
In this sense, adaptation speaks to queer theory’s refusal of origins, its challenge to linear temporality and its sense of the performative. Hutcheon continues: ‘Despite being temporally second, [adaptation] is both an interpretive and a creative act; it is storytelling as both rereading and rerelating.’8 Within this paradigm, adaptation is a form of queering, in that queerness has always engaged critically with secondariness, imitation and the hierarchy of origins. How, then, might this frame the encounter between adaptation as an engagement with genre and queer theory as an engagement with gender in relation to the Lister diaries and their televisual adaptation? How does the fan response to the adaptation engage with the nonconforming Lister of the historical archive?
Wainwright has herself resisted the term ‘adaptation’, which she argues suggests the smooth translation from a coherent, recognisable genre to another equally stable generic form, such as novel to film or theatre to musical. In contrast, the Lister diaries were like ‘juggling with mercury’ and were constantly slipping through her fingers.9 In the interview with Emma Donoghue for this volume, Wainwright prefers to call her work on Lister ‘a dramatisation of a real life’.10 Rather than seeing them as a fixed account, Wainwright experienced the diaries as an evolving form with unpredictable narrative threads and dead ends. The Lister diaries tell the story of a life evolving on a day-to-day basis, with no endpoint from which the work can be rendered fully coherent. The diaries simply stop when Anne Lister falls ill on her travels and dies. Therefore, Wainwright has had to engage in her own to and fro between history and story – a process that has led to the inclusion of many of the diaries’ events and anecdotes and direct transcriptions of the diaries’ language into the show – as well as creating a fictional frame to fit the demands of prime-time television.11
Gentleman Jack aligns with what Eve Ng, borrowing from Claire Monk, has termed quality ‘post-heritage’ drama, as well as with the literary concept of ‘neo-historical fiction’, coined by Katharine Harris.12 For these scholars, the more recent iterations of historical drama – both on screen and in novel form – self-consciously incorporate an aspect of the present into representations of the past, often through ‘the conspicuous use of anachronisms’,13 or by including previously unrepresented subject positions in terms of race, class, sexuality and gender. According to Harris, the goal is to ‘push beyond what we know or think is “true” about the past in order to invent new histories’.14 Both Ng and Harris invoke Sarah Waters’s queer lesbian nineteenth-century novels – several of which have been adapted for television by the BBC – as examples of post-heritage and neo-historical narratives that laid the groundwork for queer historical representation.
In televisual terms, the show that Gentleman Jack most resembles is the BBC’s production of Portrait of a Marriage (1990), a three-part mini-series about Vita Sackville-West’s 1920s affair with Violet Trefusis, based on Nigel Nicolson’s biographical account of his parents’ marriage. It stars Janet McTeer as Vita and Cathryn Harrison as Violet, and as with Gentleman Jack, it is a historically grounded lesbian narrative. Further echoing the Lister archive, Sackville-West kept a detailed diary of her affair with Violet, as well as with other lovers. Janet McTeer’s performance as Vita also parallels Suranne Jones’s as Lister in its gender nonconforming presentation and claiming of lesbian sexuality, to the point where Nigel Nicolson, who sold the rights to Portrait of a Marriage, argued that the production ‘had too much sex in it’ and that ‘[t]he affair could have been suggested much more delicately; it could be done by gesture and look, not necessarily by performance’.15
The historical distance between 1990 and 2019, when Gentleman Jack aired on BBC’s Sunday evening prime-time slot, can best be summed up by contemporary critics’ positive response to the representation of lesbian sex on screen.16 However, for an adaptation such as Portrait of a Marriage, which appeared prior to the advent of social media – Facebook having started in 2004 – it is harder to gauge the emergence of a fanbase. While Diva, the UK’s most widely circulated lesbian magazine, was founded in 1994 and played a key role in disseminating lesbian subculture, nothing resembles the rhizomatic influence of the internet. Therefore, although Portrait of a Marriage can be compared to Gentleman Jack in terms of content, it is harder to do so in terms of reception. This is reflected in the fanbase itself, which has responded to Gentleman Jack as if such lesbian televisual representation of lives from the past was the first of its kind.
Unpacking the underlying causes that have led fans to become so affectively attached to Gentleman Jack can give us certain insights into the gains and losses of adaptation and help us to understand the affective mechanisms of post-heritage drama for a queer and lesbian audience. This attachment also engages with questions of queer temporality, in that the fanbase is finding something entirely new in the old and moving backwards in time as a way of reclaiming a present that is itself saturated with a certain kind of nostalgia. As a source text, the Lister diaries are contesting the gender and sexual norms of nineteenth-century society, and Wainwright’s challenge has been to capture their already existing nonconformity for a twenty-first-century audience. How can Lister appear queer both in her time and in ours? And what is it, exactly, that the fans have been responding to with such passionate commitment?
At the same time, as Ng suggests, part of the appeal of Gentleman Jack lies as much in what is familiar as in what is ground-breaking. As a more lavish production than the original BBC Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (2010), Gentleman Jack fulfils the mandate of quality drama with its ‘innovations in storytelling’, its ‘high production values’ and its ‘distinctive aesthetic qualities’.17 These elements place Gentleman Jack alongside the familiar adaptations of Jane Austen novels and create certain expectations in the viewer, ones that include ‘a certain image of England and Englishness’18 generated through what James Leggott and Julie Taddeo describe as key visual hallmarks, such as English landscaping and the representation of stately homes.19 In its exploitation of certain visual tropes that connote Englishness, such as the rolling hills of the Yorkshire landscape and scenes set in both Walker’s and Lister’s manor houses, Gentleman Jack participates in a mode of representation which Ng notes continues to depend on ‘hierarchies of class, race, and nation that have long structured the narratives of the genre’.20
The familiar therefore rubs up against the unfamiliar, in that Gentleman Jack subverts the content but not the context of quality historical drama. Indeed, one fan became attracted to the show because it was taking place around Jane Austen’s time and she knew she would be treated to the familiar props and landscapes of the Regency and early Victorian eras.21 While Ng is more critical of Gentleman Jack’s adherence to the dramatic conventions that reinforce the norms of a certain nostalgic Englishness, Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars argue that the show also challenges the conventions of historical drama by including multiple perspectives beyond Lister’s own privileged one and ‘frequent[ly] abandons Lister in favour of a wider picture of rural English life in the 1830s’.22 This also distinguishes the Gentleman Jack series from the first BBC feature adaptation of the Lister diaries, which was entirely from Lister’s perspective.
Gentleman Jack’s newness, in this sense, depends on how it takes up quality heritage television conventions as a way of subverting certain, although not all, of our expectations. The show also speaks to what Paula Blank argues is a turning away from queer history as ‘alterity’ and seeing the past ‘in terms of difference’, towards an embracing of the non-linear and what Madhavi Menon has called ‘homohistory’ and Carolyn Dinshaw has framed as ‘touching across time’.23 For Blank, the history of sexuality is less forward-moving than palimpsestic, with different models co-existing over the centuries and producing both a mode of ‘self-othering’ and a ‘queer … desire for a provisional reidentification with the past’.24 Carla Freccero has also argued for thinking about the past as a form of ‘queer spectrality’, a haunting in which ‘the past or the future presses upon us with a kind of insistence or demand, a demand to which we must somehow respond’.25 For Maier and Friars, Gentleman Jack positions Lister as ‘the connective tissue’ between ‘a lost past and present paradigm’.26 In each of these approaches to the queerly historical and the historically queer, there is a desire for both a recuperation of the queer past – defined as it has been by erasure and invisibility – and a refusal to read it in terms of progression. The queer past, these theorists argue, is a living, tactile thing that engages and simultaneously eludes us in a continuous back and forth. Furthermore, in producing an affective rather than a strictly scholarly engagement with the queer historical past, Gentleman Jack has created a fluid mode of identification that lies somewhere between fact and fiction.27
In fans’ responses, there is an implicit recognition of the precarity of queer history and of the unlikely possibility that a series tied to such an archive could exist in the first place. The diaries not only came close to being burned when their encrypted content was first decoded in the 1890s, but they also languished in various repositories for one hundred and fifty years before extracts of the coded sections were published by Helena Whitbread in 1988 and the modern world was ready to read them. The Gentleman Jack adaptation of the Lister diaries therefore parallels and undoes the scholarly project in various ways. While the role of the traditional scholar can be thought of as seeking out the truth of the past through accurate historical contextualisation and reconstruction – the past as fully footnoted – the role of the scriptwriter might be seen as adapting the past for the purposes of the present, and for an audience who may have no particular investment in history per se. In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original.
In this sense, Gentleman Jack has created a new kind of originating moment for the diaries themselves. Unlike the Anne Lister BBC film, Gentleman Jack covers a relatively small portion of the diaries. It is set in the year 1832, when Lister is forty-one years old and has just been rejected by her Scottish lover, Vere Hobart. At this point, Lister is looking for a more permanent companion, having had, over the past twenty years or so, a series of flirtations and more serious affairs with women from the surrounding area and during her stay in Paris in 1824. The first season’s eight episodes follow Lister’s encounter with and courtship of Ann Walker, a neighbouring heiress who, like Lister, has inherited her own property but is considerably wealthier. Walker is presented as feminine and relatively fragile, and although she is clearly in love with Lister, we see her turning down Lister’s initial proposal of ‘marriage’, the social anomaly of this being too much for Walker to envisage. The couple undergo several setbacks, including Walker’s feelings of anxiety over her attraction to Lister and subsequent breakdown. After a separation of some months, the couple are reunited in the final episode, and this time Walker is the one to bring up the marriage proposal, which both then enthusiastically commit to.
Supplementing the couple’s romance narrative, we have scenes of Lister’s family life, including her close relationship with her aunt and uncle and her sparring and competitive relationship with her sister, Marian. We see Lister dealing with her tenants, competing with the local coal baron, Mr Rawson, and developing her plans to sink her own pit. We also witness her being harassed and accosted on a country road and, of course, we see her writing her diary. As mentioned, landscape plays a key role and scenes of Yorkshire, Halifax, Shibden Hall and Crow Nest are interspersed with European travel, as in episode seven when Lister is invited to the court of the Queen of Denmark.
Through Jones’s portrayal, Lister’s gentlemanly cosmopolitanism compellingly combines visual and narrative pleasure and the viewer cannot but fully champion her courtship of Ann Walker. (See Figure 8) Yet this on-screen seduction raises interesting questions about its off-screen effects and the fans’ own experience of being seduced. Fans have reacted to the show’s familiar romance landmarks as much as to its innovative reworking of the romance trope. This has led to three broad modes of response from the fanbase: a sense of community building that connects past and present, personal narratives of self-transformation, and acute feelings of nostalgia and loss. We will unpack these affective responses in order to analyse the Gentleman Jack effect in terms of our twenty-first-century understandings of gender and sexuality.
Figure 8 Gentleman Jack, season one.
The fanbase has organised itself in different ways, with one of its most striking characteristics being lesbian community building. This has taken place largely on Facebook, coalescing around a lesbian-identified fanbase through various Facebook groups, such as the ‘Lister Sisters’ and ‘Shibden after Dark’. Fans can, of course, belong to multiple platforms depending on their needs and wants. These groups have in turn generated further adaptive mutations, such as cosplay and fanfiction. The Facebook fandom phenomenon is also what led Janet Lea to collect and publish fans’ responses in The Gentleman Jack Effect. Lea is a native of Texas and full-time writer, and her book of interviews with Gentleman Jack fans was published in September 2021, barely two years after the airing of season one. Lea frames her project through a specifically lesbian lens, shaping the connection between Jones’s Lister, Rundle’s Walker and the fanbase as a lesbian one, even though there are also non-lesbian participants and the term ‘lesbian’ never appears in the Lister diaries.
Lea’s range of participants has an impressive global reach, with fans from Kenya, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, among others, encompassing sixty-nine interviews from sixteen countries, only a small selection of the six hundred responses from forty-four countries Lea received when she sent out her questionnaire on Facebook. The Gentleman Jack HBO/BBC Facebook group itself contains 10,000 members ‘of all ages from 100 different countries’.28 The use of Facebook as the interview source also signals a particular demographic, and although some fans are in their twenties, the majority are between thirty and seventy years old, which also potentially speaks to their predominant identification as lesbian rather than more recently available terms, suggesting a generational reclaiming of lesbian identity through the figure of ‘Gentleman Jack’.
Within this construction of lesbian community, fans describe moments of self-transformation and experiences of identification across time. This identification, in turn, depends on reading Lister as an authentic subject as well as a post-heritage drama lesbian heroine. Authenticity has many resonances, from designating an original document (as in the authentic Lister diaries), to being based on fact (as in the authentic historical archive), to the existential notion of living responsibly (as in living an authentic life), all of which are reflected in fans’ responses to Gentleman Jack.29 Fans talk about feelings of recognition and familiarity – ‘I felt like I was going home’30 – as well as becoming who they were supposed to be: ‘It’s all about just becoming who I really want to be, really who I have been all along.’31 One of the most moving interviews is with seventy-one-year-old Inna Clawsette (pseudonym), who had been in a heterosexual marriage for thirty years and who had always felt something was missing. She says that after watching Gentleman Jack, ‘For the first time in my life, I could just be myself … and that changed me.’32 Jones’s Lister externalises and makes visible a desire for authenticity that fans come to recognise in themselves, often for the first time. Fans also oscillate between idealising Lister and idealising the Lister–Walker couple, so that part of the fantasy of authenticity Gentleman Jack provides is relational: ‘If Anne and Ann could be themselves nearly 200 years ago, surely I could do the same in 2019.’33
Another identificatory thread that reappears between Jones’s Lister and the fans’ responses is Lister’s firm sense of self at a time when there was no clear language to support it. Paradoxically, it is Lister’s absence of identificatory language that creates a strong identification among the fans. The fact that Lister could be herself without having to name herself seems to open up opportunities for fans who have also struggled with questions of naming, whether in terms of coming out of the closet, asserting themselves in different realms such as the workplace, or resisting certain labels. In this sense, Wainwright’s representation of Lister has produced a psychological openness to new trajectories of selfhood.
This sense of newness has created an unprecedented interest in queer historical representation and in the possibilities the past can offer. Accompanying fans’ recognition of Lister’s existential authenticity – which arguably could also be applied to the characters in adaptations of Waters’s novels – is Lister’s historical authenticity. In her preface, Lea acknowledges the significance of Gentleman Jack’s tie to the historical Anne Lister: ‘Thanks to Gentleman Jack, I fell in love with a woman who had been buried for nearly two hundred years.’34 Older fans such as Kate Brown from the United States, in her mid-sixties, have described a form of temporal identification with Lister: ‘Seeing that, on TV this late in life and knowing there was a real person who experienced what we’ve experienced and she did it 200 years ago, was so validating for me.’35 In this interview, Kate is identifying her queer Baltimore youth in the 1970s with the experiences of nineteenth-century Lister, collapsing both time and place in ways that invoke Dinshaw’s notion of ‘touching across time’. The historical is subsumed under the personal as well as expanded to include past and present in a synchronous fashion. In this moment of temporal connectivity, Lister’s story simultaneously represents both her own present and Kate’s past.
For many fans, there is the added experience of unmediated spontaneity, the coming upon Lister without premeditation or intent, which has generated a feeling of authentic connection. Patience, a queer Kenyan fan who settled in the United States in part to escape the gender-normative social structures of her homeland, writes: ‘I caught a snippet of Anne Lister when she adjusts her top hat with her stick, and I remember thinking, “What is that? That looks gay.”’36 Patience is one of many fans who came upon Gentleman Jack spontaneously and who describes the effect of the series as having a direct impact on her life, from making her change her wardrobe to feeling ‘more comfortable and more self-assured’.37 Jones’s Lister created in Patience a new sense of freedom because the character herself claimed that same freedom. Most surprising in this interview is Patience’s cross-race as well as her transhistorical identification with Lister. Already positioned outside the American norm by her race – ‘everywhere I go, people see me first and foremost as black’38 – Patience seems to have found a kindred spirit in Lister’s own outlier status that combines race and sexuality. Patience, like Lister, finds herself the object of the gaze, and she admires Lister’s refusal to be defined by that normative gaze: ‘She wasn’t looking to be validated by other people. She just knew – in an environment where the culture didn’t even have words to describe who she was.’39 Here the language of existential authenticity enables both a transhistorical and transracial reading of Lister, allowing Patience to see herself in Lister across time.
The queer temporal effect of the Lister diaries – that of moving backwards in time in order to experience a new sense of the present – has a geographical as well as a historical component. One of the more detailed interviews is with Jen Carter from Maharashtra, India, and as with Patience, it documents some of the difficulties the LGBTQ+ community faces in countries lacking certain human rights protections. In India, even though homosexuality was officially decriminalised in 2018, ‘disapproval … remains high’.40 Jen’s response to the show is particularly striking in terms of India’s own complex history of British colonisation, which was at its height in Lister’s era.41 Lea explains that when Jen was a child, ‘her father had given her Jane Austen novels to read to improve her English’.42 However, in reading Pride and Prejudice, rather than being attracted to the figure of Mr Darcy, Jen wanted to be him, so that in this case, the British colonial canon is queered by its postcolonial reader and Gentleman Jack ultimately provided the perfect Darcy replacement.
As with Patience, Jen finds herself collapsing her personal history into Lister’s narrative: ‘When I saw the first episode of Gentleman Jack and Anne’s problems with Vere Hobart, I thought to myself, “Oh my God, I’m watching this – it’s my life!”’43 Importantly, the nineteenth-century constraints around gender and sexuality in Lister’s life potentially resemble those in Jen’s life more closely than for a Western viewer. While Jen’s father was extremely understanding of Jen’s sexuality, her female partner’s father threatened to kill himself if she did not go through with her arranged marriage.44 As a result, both young women attempted suicide and their relationship fell apart, a narrative that contains echoes of Ann Walker’s own breakdown in response to the constraints of nineteenth-century norms. Nine years later, Jen discovered Gentleman Jack: ‘Without Gentleman Jack I don’t know when I would have had the courage to come out.’45 Lea explains that Jen took the final step by posting her story, along with a photograph of herself, on the ‘Shibden after Dark’ website on 3 April 2020, Anne Lister’s birthday.
In these accounts, the queer lesbian viewer is rendered authentic through the converging vectors of authenticity, as feelings of familiarity, of ‘going home’ and of historical connection become part of the viewing experience. Yet the issue of authenticity is far from straightforward, as it begs the question of what is being authenticated. To begin with, fans are engaging with a mediated version of Lister, one that has been inevitably shaped and glamorised in the tradition of costume drama, even if that tradition is being queerly challenged. They are also responding to the strategic anachronisms that Wainwright has put in place. This generates a form of historical desire in which ‘the creative space of fiction’ is used ‘to resist a linear construction of time’, allowing us to ‘imagine anachronistic queer histories’.46 As Harris points out, the use of anachronism displaces conventional historical representation by layering the present on to the past and producing an affective desire for a relation across time that challenges linear models of historical authenticity.
In particular, the technique of breaking the fourth wall not only creates a synchronous bond between viewer and actor, collapsing past and present, but also produces an intimacy that echoes the genre of the diary, as if Lister were letting the viewer into her private, intimate world. As Wainwright says in her interview, Lister ‘talking to camera … was a no-brainer because it’s just like the immediacy of reading the journal’.47 In these anachronistic moments of connection, Jones’s Lister quotes directly from the diaries, returning us to the original source at the very moment when Jones in the present is displacing the Lister of the past. The breaking of the fourth wall not only reminds the viewer that they are watching a fictional performance on screen, but also brings attention to the fact of adaptation. In this sense, the figure of Lister becomes more historical – through her original words addressed directly to the viewer – and less so – through Jones’s direct gaze into the viewer’s sitting room.
Several fans, such as Michaela Dresel from New Zealand, have recorded the breaking of the fourth wall as being a defining moment: ‘The fourth wall breaks in the show when Anne Lister looks into the camera and quotes from her diaries got me hooked.’48 Katherina Oh from Singapore experienced the breaking of the fourth wall as a mode of ‘cheeky … flirting’, saying, ‘I loved when Suranne Jones broke the fourth wall. She is very cheeky when she does the raising of her eyebrows and flirting with the camera.’49 It is also significant that while Dresel refers to Anne Lister, Oh refers to Suranne Jones, so that while Dresel is inside the narrative and sustains the fiction of Lister’s presence, Oh steps outside it.
A further paradox of the felt authenticity of Lister and Walker in Gentleman Jack lies in Wainwright’s exploitation of sartorial seduction, made possible by the show’s status as a high-quality drama production. Perhaps the most idealised and fictionalised aspect of the series, and of a quality well beyond what Lister herself would have worn or been able to afford, the Gentleman Jack wardrobe adds a visual and tactile glamour to the characters that seduces the viewing public and paradoxically affirms a mode of queer authenticity. While Lister appears in black skirts and a military-inspired greatcoat, Ann Walker’s richly textured dresses allude to the eighteenth-century portraiture of a Fragonard or a Boucher. Furthermore, the gender-bending butch–femme contrast of Lister and Walker references the queer tradition of gender performativity and a queer sartorial history that spans the twentieth century, from the aristocratic Radclyffe Hall through to 1950s butch–femme working-class culture. Wainwright’s addition of Lister’s top hat – which Lister herself never wore – gives her an added masculinised authority, while also echoing the eighteenth-century drawings and caricatures of the Ladies of Llangollen, a famous female couple who eloped from Ireland to Wales in the 1780s to set up home together, and whom Lister greatly admired.
Yet Jones’s Lister also remains remarkably faithful to the descriptions in the diaries. In her diary entries, Lister frequently described both her own sense of her appearance and how others saw her, leaving us with a rich account of her clothing choices – in particular her early decision to wear only black – along with her body language and her nonconforming gender presentation. Lister was acutely aware of the effects of her physical presence and paid attention to gestures large and small, from her energetic walk to how she held her cane and twirled her watch. Jones, in turn, follows Lister’s lead, and through her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, her Lister repeatedly contests the codes of nineteenth-century normative femininity – particularly when placed in the context of mainstream nineteenth-century heritage drama.
In terms of fans’ responses, Lister’s appeal therefore lies as much in her gender presentation as in her queer sexuality. Importantly, this has fed into Twitter debates that reflect our current struggles over identity politics. In an echo of the controversy concerning the plaques celebrating Lister and Walker’s union in Holy Trinity Church, York – where the phrase ‘gender-nonconforming’ was replaced, after protests, with ‘lesbian’ – Twitter responses to Gentleman Jack have ranged from claiming Lister as a lesbian, to seeing her as ‘the Great Butch of History’,50 to insisting she was ‘AT THE VERY LEAST GNC/non-binary’, and that ‘the argument could definitely be made that Anne would be a trans man were the resources available’.51 Other Twitter responses note the irony of opposing groups on the identity spectrum each claiming Lister for themselves, which makes Lister both central to the conversation about identity politics and a flashpoint for disagreement.52 While the overt presentism in these debates may be frustrating to some, they show how the past can invade the present and both affirm and redefine it. They also expose the extent to which the figure of Lister generates in fans a desire for identity, even as Lister herself can never be firmly identified.
One of the series’ distinctive features is how it pays close attention to Lister’s politics in a way the Secret Diaries film did not; we see Lister responding to the implications of the 1832 Reform Bill as well as her commenting on her tenants and competing with Rawson, the local coal baron. At the same time, Lister’s conservative political stance and her engagement in an aggressive form of capitalism is reconfigured through a proto-feminist lens as having the courage to stand up to the boys, as when she vies for her own coal mine. Lister’s gender nonconformity is celebrated in ways that allow her to behave like the men rather than questioning the terms of their privilege, in both her personal and her public life. Yet Wainwright, herself from a working-class background, also reminds us that Lister ‘wasn’t even landed gentry – more like the level below, yeomanry, because the Shibden estate isn’t that big, only about 400 acres’.53 Until her inheritance, Lister was also struggling for money, ‘always … borrow[ing] and wait[ing] for handouts’.54 Wainwright also suggestively gives Lister’s sister, Marian – whom Lister generally ignores and overrides – more progressive views than Lister herself – as when they are discussing the 1832 Reform Bill – subtly pointing to Lister’s investment in the political status quo. At the same time, Lister, unlike Marian, is the one being harassed and attacked on country roads on account of her gender nonconformity. In refusing conventional femininity, Lister is placing herself permanently at risk and, as Susan. S. Lanser has argued, her class allegiance and upward mobility can be read as engaging in a mode of self-protection and as a ‘compensatory conservatism … and classism’.55 Lister foregrounds what Lanser terms the ‘status risk’ of her ‘gender transgressions’ by overdetermining her class status.56
Although the majority of fans see Lister as transformative for her time and for theirs, their primary response to her remains intensely personal and privileges an affective over a political engagement with her narrative. There is a focus on Lister’s romantic individualism that is matched by an almost total silence concerning her Tory politics, her upward mobility and her landlord status. We see only the occasional critical entry, such as Tumblr’s deandykery, who writes: ‘when the class war comes [Lister] will not be spared’.57 While it is a paradox of the show that a figure who defines herself through her uniqueness and her exceptionalism has become a harbinger for contemporary community building, this also speaks to the anachronistic effect of translating the past into the present. Fans see in Lister’s refusal to remain isolated and her determination to participate in the privileges afforded her, despite her outlier status, the possibilities of a queer future. In addition, Jones’s performance arguably generates feelings of desire and/or identification that obfuscate Lister’s political conservatism. What fans fail to attend to is therefore as telling as what they highlight.
The most compelling scene for the fanbase has been the marriage proposal and the wedding day in season one’s final episode. The Lister diaries themselves, as Simon Joyce points out, ‘are full of quasi-matrimonial rituals in which she exchanges symbolic tokens with lovers as signs of “marital commitment”: rings, locks of hair, and in one striking moment, pubic hair’.58 Lister was obsessed with marriage as well as acutely aware of her exclusion from it. The marriage proposal scene takes place on top of a hill overlooking the lush Yorkshire countryside, with a subtly romantic musical score that crescendos with the sealing kiss, Walker in a powder-blue dress that echoes the sky, and Lister in her signature black overcoat studded with brass buttons. As Lister says to Walker, ‘but we’re not alive. Are we? If we’re not taking the odd risk now and again,’ a risk which is dramatised in the representation of this queer historical couple being shown in a prime-time slot.59 The marriage proposal scene was posted by the BBC as a stand-alone YouTube clip, which has received close to a million (805,650) views to date, with 1,165 comments.
In the diaries, however, there is no hilltop proposal scene and the description of the wedding day is minimal, as Lister writes on 30 March 1834: ‘At Goodramgate church at 10 35; Miss W – and I and Thomas staid [for] the sacrament … The first time I ever joined Miss W – in my prayers – I had prayed that our union might be happy – she had not thought of doing as much for me.’60 Lister had already proposed and made plans for attending a church service in lieu of a wedding ceremony as early as 14 December 1832: ‘Miss W – told me in the hut if she said “Yes” again it should be binding. It should be the same as a marriage and she would give me no cause to be jealous – made no objection to what I proposed, that is, her declaring it on the Bible & taking the sacrament with me at Shibden or Lightcliffe church.’61 This entry shows how the wedding vows were themselves in a state of instability, having been made once, then rebuffed, then reconfirmed. This highlights the complexities of enacting a public ceremony as a private event and fully believing in it as a valid speech act. While Wainwright takes on some of this hesitancy by having Walker initially refuse Lister before the final episode, this serves primarily as a build-up to the romantic hilltop scene.
Responding to this final episode, the Gentleman Jack fanbase has fully endorsed the reality of Lister marrying her beloved, and there are now lesbian marriage ceremonies being performed at Shibden Hall and many pilgrimages to Holy Trinity Church, which also boasts the aforementioned heritage plaque of the Lister–Walker union signalling the first lesbian marriage. For the fans, Lister’s marriage is a further confirmation of her authenticity, in that she is seen following her nature through this quasi-public ritual.
Yet it is precisely at the intersection of these opposing positions that the queerness of historical time comes into play. The original fiction, after all, belongs to Lister herself. It is she who was repeatedly staging and performing marital rituals with her lovers as a way of claiming social belonging and asserting her desire and her relationships in a world that was rendering them invisible. Wainwright’s response has been to foreground, rather than to mask, this fantasy element as an integral part of the Lister narrative. By following the classic courtship and romance model of conventional costume drama, yet peopling it with queer protagonists, Wainwright creates belonging and recognition across time, while arguably honouring, rather than simply fictionalising, Lister’s stated desires in her diary entries. In this sense, Wainwright gives Lister, and the fans, ‘the marriage she (and they) always wanted’.62
While this collapse of the historical into the fictional can certainly be read as historically inaccurate, it is also a form of queer authenticity, what Jose Esteban Muñoz has theorised as a mode of ‘queer utopianism’.63 The marital scene dramatises what could have been, blending the affects of nostalgia and sentimentalism and offering what Heather Hogan describes as ‘the latitude to contain multitudes in stories’.64 Indeed, this moment of infidelity to the original diaries strikes a particular chord with Lister’s own Don Juan-esque capacity for sexual infidelity, which Wainwright explores in season two. By the time she courts Walker, Lister has had eleven lovers that we know of, some of them overlapping, yet her goal throughout the diaries, as she says in 1817, is to ‘have some female companion whom I could love & depend upon’.65 Wainwright follows what James Harold describes as a ‘thematic fidelity’ to Lister’s aspirational domestic romance narrative, but leaves room for the continued possibility of infidelity, both on Lister’s part and in terms of Wainwright’s own interpretation of the source material.66
While much of the fanbase has foregrounded the ways in which Gentleman Jack has generated new possibilities for global community building among lesbian and queer subjects – as illustrated in Lea’s book – this productive relationality has been accompanied by complicated affective responses of loss and nostalgia as well as fulfilment, all of which speak to the ambivalent legacy of queer history-making. Among claims of transformation, fulfilment and community, there are also feelings of loss and grief, which point to a more convoluted relationship to the Gentleman Jack effect. Louise Alexander, a clergywoman from the United States, sums up her response as follows: ‘Seeing the authentic portrayal of Anne Lister and Ann Walker stirred up grief and longing: grief for what I had missed and not allowed myself to feel for a very long time, and longing for the passion and the wholeness that Anne Lister represents.’67 Such reactions complicate narratives of transition and transformation and gesture towards an affect more closely tied to trauma and injury rather than to completion and fulfilment.
While on viewing Gentleman Jack, fans have described a feeling of coming home, they are also describing the nostalgic quality of a longing for home, from the Greek roots ‘algia’ meaning ‘longing’ and ‘nostos’ meaning ‘return home’. Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as both ‘a sentiment of loss and displacement’ and ‘a romance with one’s own fantasy’,68 in that it can generate a longing for something that could have been rather than something that once was. This is the temporality of the perfect conditional and it articulates a form of desire that claims missed opportunities and possibilities from the past, rather than opening up potentialities for the future, the latter being the mainstay of the fanbase response. The perfect conditional instead designates a wistful, contemplative and melancholic subject position, one which is also present in certain of the fans’ discourse on Gentleman Jack and which points to the convoluted trajectory of queer history itself.
One example of this melancholic response is Rachael Biggs’s personal essay on Gentleman Jack, ‘How Gentleman Jack Changed My Life Forever’, which appeared in Britain’s Diva magazine on 20 August 2019. As with many of Lea’s interviewees, Biggs is British and describes herself as a teacher and mother of three girls living in rural England, with a doctor wife. Biggs offers one of the earliest published responses to season one of Gentleman Jack, the final episode of which aired on 7 July 2019. In her opening paragraph, Biggs describes her viewing experience as ‘the most magnificent (and scary) journey’ and explains how it threw off her concentration at work and made her feel ‘grief’ and feelings of ‘utter sadness’ which ‘knocked [her] sideways’.69 Following season one’s finale, Biggs was ‘struggling to concentrate at work’ and felt ‘desperate to understand why [she] felt so much pain … it literally made [her] heart ache’.70 Not only was her response overwhelming, but in contrast to many of Lea’s interviewees, Biggs experienced intense feelings of hurt rather than fulfilment. The experience of watching Gentleman Jack positioned her as a mourner, as having lost something.
As with Kate Brown, who is brought back to her youth after watching the show, Biggs feels validated in her present while also recognising, as she says, ‘what me as a little girl and me as a teenager and me as a young woman missed out on’.71 In Biggs’s case, Lister’s story brings to the fore the failed past, revealing what could have been and acknowledging what can now never be fully recovered. In knocking Biggs off-course, the show disrupts her forward movement, creating a different pathway, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, ‘by bringing what is “behind” to the front’.72 While, as for other fans, Gentleman Jack was equally transformative and, as Biggs says, gave her the ‘confidence to express my innermost thoughts and my ability to just simply be me’, the transformation required a painful form of regression.73
Biggs’s article succinctly articulates the fusing of the personal and the historical past, which speaks to the affective force of Wainwright’s vision in creating Gentleman Jack. As with other fans, a large part of Biggs’s emotional response lies in the fact that Lister and Walker were real historical figures: ‘it is not at all make-believe. It’s based on a real-life story, a story dating back almost 200 years.’74 Here, the historical past supports, validates and gives shape to the personal past. Biggs then decides to make a pilgrimage to Shibden Hall and explains that ‘[v]isiting Ann Walker’s burial site was one of the most profound moments of my life’.75 She feels as though Ann Walker ‘was a relative of mine, almost as if I was discovering part of my long lost family tree’.76 As with Kate Brown, what Biggs glimpses here is the possibility of a lineage, of a past that can be traced, recognised and celebrated up to the present moment, and that incorporates her own childhood and her own past in the process. She undergoes a kind of reverse trauma; rather than having a painful suppressed memory rise to the surface, she experiences the filling of a gap that she never knew was there. What she grieves is the paradoxical presence, rather than absence, of Lister and Walker, as figures who have always been present, yet who have been obscured and ghosted by the heterosexual historical narrative. Queer history, in this sense, is both discovered and occluded in the same moment.
At the core of this affective response is once again the mix of existential and historical authenticity. For Biggs, it is the fact of ‘a historic figure, who almost 200 years ago, stayed true to herself and married another woman’, that drives her profound attachment to the narrative.77 And it is this authenticity that now enables Biggs, as she says, ‘to be exactly who I am’, a feeling she claims she did not have before seeing the show.78 What Gentleman Jack offers fans is a historical connection created through affinity rather than kinship ties and that depends on affective longing rather than archival accuracy. The figures of Lister and Walker are both/and, rather than either/or, both real and fictional, both history and story, both authentic and idealised. They offer a queer history that fans did not know they wanted or needed, yet one that seems to resonate with them in multiple ways.
Biggs’s Diva article garnered thirty-two responses, the majority of which echo her sentiments of loss and grief in the wake of viewing Gentleman Jack, with comments such as ‘You have written exactly how I feel,’ ‘I was left feeling empty, full of anguish, not knowing why,’ ‘I identify with everything you write … I thought I was the only woman who felt like this,’ ‘I wept as I read this article as well,’ ‘I spent many hours pondering why this show wouldn’t let me go’ and so on. Other comments focus on the question of authenticity: ‘This piece … speaks my truth as a gay woman,’ ‘The show validates everything I am,’ ‘I grieve for a lifetime of hiding my very essence,’ and they also touch lesbian subjects further afield, with one woman writing: ‘I had to watch the show by myself, alone in my room, on a non-official website knowing that in my country there’s no same-sex marriage.’ And finally: ‘Here these two groundbreaking women have been dead all these years, and I am still grieving about them.’79 We see here the emergence of a collective response, which in turn generates an empathetic mode of identification. The last comment in particular speaks to the heart of the affective conundrum, in that Gentleman Jack brings Lister and Walker to life in a way that projects them into the future, while simultaneously reminding us that they belong to the past. Lister and Walker create an almost untenable queer temporality, in that the experience of grieving is built into the narrative to the extent that the discovery of their existence is itself a form of loss. The two questions to which the fans are implicitly responding are: (1) How did we not know about this before? and (2) Can this story really be real?
The Lister diaries have generated an alternative queer historical trajectory beyond normative scholarly parameters in a way that simultaneously reconfigures the notion of authenticity. Wainwright, who knows the diaries intimately, has shaped them into a narrative that communicates a particular kind of attachment, one that produces a form of longing, as well as a desire for identification and queer lineage. For the fans, this desire exists in the inseparable merging of the real and the fictional; in terms of their viewing experience, Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle are Anne Lister and Ann Walker, yet this leads fans such as Biggs to make the pilgrimage to Shibden Hall in order to validate the historical ‘realness’ of the Gentleman Jack narrative.
The location of the fans’ desire is therefore complicated, for it is a desire for the fiction to be true and to some degree for the truth to be fictional (or at least, for the truth to follow Wainwright’s script). But what emerges from a parsing of the fans’ responses, above all, is a desire for affirmation and for the making real of queer lives and queer pasts. The question is less how close to the original diaries is Gentleman Jack, than how successful has the series been in generating a belief in that past? The fans’ semantic field of lack, loss and grieving reveals the failure of history proper to make room for queer histories and therefore brings to the surface the inauthenticity of queer existence. The fact that Biggs and other fans link the public story of Lister and Walker to their own private narratives of the self points to the broader question, posed by Judith Butler, of what lives are worth remembering and what lives are grievable.80 Gentleman Jack makes possible a new kind of grieving, for a past that has been repeatedly desired and repeatedly suppressed, as with the history of the Lister diaries themselves.
In David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s collection of essays, Loss, the authors argue that loss can be ‘a creative process’ rather than simply reactive, ‘a field in which the past is brought to bear witness to the present – as a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and a moment of production’.81 For these fans, Gentlemen Jack functions as this ‘flash of emergence’, a glimpse of another possible account of history that is outside ‘history’s victorious hegemonies’.82 In this sense, Lister is made present yet remains elusive, graspable only through a kind of ‘melancholic excess’.83 The journey Wainwright takes us on is one both of recovery and of an anticipatory nostalgia for what could have been. As a romanticising of and a romance with the scholarly archive, Gentleman Jack calls into question the boundaries between the scholarly and the fictional in ways that allow us to imagine a more elastic and capacious relationship between stories and history, and queer pasts and the queer present.
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