As Good as a Marriage: The Anne Lister Diaries 1836-38

The BBC and HBO series Gentleman Jack has propelled interest in Anne Lister to new heights, particularly her personal diaries, written in hard-to-read-code. In this book, Jill Liddington continues the project she started with Female Fortune, guiding the reader through Anne Lister’s writings from 1836-38.

As Good as a Marriage covers the period of Anne Lister’s life following her marriage to wealthy local heiress Anne Walker, her inheritance of Shibden Hall after the death of her father, and her subsequent attempts to remodel herself and Shibden with appropriate grandeur. It is a period in Lister’s life when she was at her most imposing, buoyed by growing self confidence in fulfilling her social ambitions as landowner, entrepreneur and traditional member of the landed gentry.

The pages of As Good as a Marriage evoke the spirit of a woman who dramatically challenged received notions of gender and female sexuality. – .