Last Updated on March 29, 2024 by Kittredge Cherry
Historical lesbian Anne Lister married Ann Walker on March 30, 1834 at Holy Trinity Church in York, England. It is considered the first recorded lesbian wedding in the history of Britain and perhaps even the world. Her wedding anniversary falls right before the annual Anne Lister Birthday Week festival in Lister’s hometown of Halifax.
Lister’s clear self-knowledge of her lesbian sexuality was matched by strong Christian faith. She was a loyal but not unquestioning supporter of the Anglican church who approached her faith with intellectual rigor. Most modern accounts downplay her religious belief, but she read the latest theology and recorded the precise length of every sermon she heard, along with its scriptural basis and her own thoughts about it.
Her journals, written in a secret code, have been called “the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history” and Lister herself is often described as “the first modern lesbian.” She wrote a total of 4 million words in her extensive diaries.
Lister’s true story and coded journals inspired the BBC series “Gentleman Jack,” which premiered in 2019.
In the companion book “Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister,” the series’ historical adviser Anna Choma writes:
“As a Christian, whose own same-sex desires she believed to be the dictate of God, Anne craved the permanency, and, ironically, respectability, of a romantic union solemnized in the same way as a marriage. She saw no reason that she and the woman she loved should not declare their commitment before God.”
The book includes newly decoded entries from Lister’s secret diaries and ends with a section called “Finale: Standing Before God.”
Lister believed that God believed in her
Lister had a strong belief that God had faith in her as she was. Although she attended church (sometimes even sampling sermons at multiple churches on a Sunday), Lister related to God in a direct, unmediated way that did not necessarily depend on the church to intercede.
Her religious beliefs and practice are explored in depth in a 2021 video interview with Jane Finn, curate of the Halifax Minster, the Anglican church that was Lister’s spiritual home. The interview is conducted by Pat Esgate, retired entertainment marketing executive and organizer of Anne Lister Birthday Week . In the video they also discuss how lesbians found faith through Anne Lister after feeling excluded by the church. Some took communion for the first time in decades at the Halifax Minster. A day-long self-guided Anne Lister Pilgrimage Walk begins and ends at the church, from the font where she was baptized to the gravestone in the church cemetery.
“Gentleman Jack” changed lives
Lister (April 2, 1791 – Sep. 22, 1840) was a swashbuckling landowner who dressed entirely in black and was nicknamed Gentleman Jack. Video trailers for the first season and second season of the BBC/HBO series capture her boldness and allure.
When “Gentleman Jack” premiered in 2019, it sparked an explosion of consciousness and courage among women, especially lesbians. The phenomenon is documented in the 2021 book “The Gentleman Jack Effect: Lessons in Breaking Rules and Living Out Loud” by Janet Lea.
Lister’s same-sex marriage made history
“In 1834, Anne Lister made history by celebrating and recording the first ever known marriage to another woman,” says the official announcement for the companion book.
Lister’s journals record the “blessing” of their “marriage” in Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York. Modern retellings of the actual church wedding vary. Some say the two women received the church’s blessing to privately contract their marriage. Others indicate that they exchanged rings secretly when the priest was not looking. Everyone agrees that the two women vowed to spend their lives together and exchanged rings. The culmination of the wedding came when they took the sacrament communion together at the church altar on Easter Sunday: March 30, 1834. From that day forward, they considered themselves married.
The wedding of Anne Lister and Ann Walker is pictured by Dutch artist and priest Jan Haen in “Heavenly LGBTQ+: Queer Icons from LGBTQ Life, Religion, and History.” The book tells the life stories of diverse historical figures, including Anne Lister.
The York Civic Trust describes the 1834 same-sex church wedding this way:
Having previously exchanged rings and made marriage vows, Anne Lister and Ann Walker attended the Easter Sunday service at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York on 30 March 1834. Anne records the event in her diary: ‘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.’ Receiving communion side by side was interpreted by the two women as a blessing of their union.
The wedding was re-enacted in a scene from a different BBC drama about Lister: the 2010 film “The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.”
This decisive moment in LGBTQ history is recognized with a plaque at Holy Trinity Church, where the women were wed. A revised plaque calling her a “lesbian” was unveiled in 2019. The original plaque was installed a year earlier, but people protested it for erasing her sexual orientation because it described Lister with the more vague term “gender-nonconforming.”
Lister’s lesbianism is clear in this often-quoted line from her journals: “I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.”
A plaque commemorating Anne Lister’s wedding is installed at the church where she married in 1834. The: revised plaque on the left replaced the controversial original plaque on the right.
For centuries her journals were a lost piece of lesbian history. They were finally deciphered and published in 1988 as “The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister,” edited by Helena Whitbread.
The current surge of interest in Anne Lister includes a 2018 biography that also ties in with the new television series: “Gentleman Jack: A Biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist” by Angela Steidele.
Since she was born more than 200 years ago, Lister naturally does not fit neatly into contemporary of LGBTQ identities. A discussion of Lister in the context of historical British categories of female friendships is included in “Female Masculinity” by Jack Halberstam.
Anne Lister’s legacy lives on
Ann Walker, the wealthy heiress to an adjoining estate, lived with Lister at her ancestral home Shibden Hall until Lister’s death in 1840. Lister died at age 49 of a fever from an insect bite while she and her wife were travelling together through the Caucasus Mountains in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
In a literal case of lesbian history being buried, Lister’s tombstone at the parish church in Halifax, West Yorkshire, was covered by a floor in 1879 and rediscovered in 2010.
Anne Lister portrait by Joshua Horner, 1830 (Wikipedia)
The classic edition of her diaries is “Female Fortune: The Anne Lister Diaries, 1833–36: Land, Gender and Authority” by Jill Liddington. It inspired Sally Wainright to create the “Gentleman Jack” series, and is being re-released in a new edition in April 2022.
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Top image credit:
Anne Lister strides past the Halifax Minster church in an image from “Heavenly LGBTQ+: Queer Icons from LGBTQ Life, Religion, and History” by Jan Haen.
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This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in April 2019, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on March 29, 2024.
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