#and i feel more ambivalent about anne lister the more i learn about her

[occidentaltourist]

Before Gentleman Jack: Emma Donoghue on Anne Lister and Eliza Raine

Bestselling author Emma Donoghue introduces Anne Lister (now often known as Gentleman Jack) and Eliza Raine, the real women behind her latest novel, Learned By Heart.

Who was Eliza Raine, and what was her relationship with Anne?

I wish Anne Lister’s first lover was just as famous as her, but Eliza Raine (1791-1860), shamefully mistreated during her long life, has been ignored ever since she died in obscurity. This fascinating woman – orphan heiress of an English East India Company doctor and his Indian ‘country wife’ – deserves attention not just for her beauty, her importance to Lister and her vivid letters, but for her outsider perspective on Regency England. Banished to the so-called motherland to be ‘Englished’ at six, with a sister she never got on with, Eliza Raine must have witnessed society from a uniquely critical perspective, and so I found it was her untold story that ended up as the centre of Learned by Heart.

Is Gentleman Jack based on a true story?

Yes, the two seasons of Sally Wainwright’s BBC/HBO series Gentleman Jack (2019-22) are not only gripping, big-budget period drama, but they’re based on archival documents. Wainwright somehow managed to craft the dramatic arcs of each episode from the daily minutiae of Lister’s five-million-word secret diary. I can’t think of another example of TV adaptation actually contributing to an archive in a virtuous feedback loop: Wainwright not only used a screenwriting award to fund scans of the massive diary, but the fandom spawned by her show helped inspire hundreds to sign up as Code Breakers (aka Lister Sisters) and do the comma-by-comma work of transcribing it. A smaller group of the Code Breakers also made it possible for me to write Learned by Heart, by transcribing and making sense of about a hundred letters between, by or about Lister and Raine.