The unexceptional Anne Lister: periods, boredom, lesbians, and mediocre sex

Anne Lister (1791 -1840) kept a journal for half of her life, beginning her first systematic journal in 1816 and writing daily entries until her death in 1840. In this thesis, I have selected three years of her journals, between 3rd April 1819 – 3rd April 1822, to focus my analysis upon. The process of transcription led me to select topics that reflected the daily and more ordinary aspects of her record. I also sought to offer a new version of Anne Lister that I felt was currently missing from representations of her in scholarship and media as ‘an extraordinary woman’. My focus on her ordinary concerns led me to write upon her consistent desire for women, her intricate and mundane connection with Tib, the regular shedding of her endometrial layer, and her daily dawdling and persistent indolence. My methodology for exploring these topics has been to write in a rhetoric of vulnerability.