The Historic and Academic Background of Lister Studies

This section describes the nature of the Shibden Hall archives and their history. It covers the history of the several times the cipher has been assailed, from John Lister and Arthur Burrell’s initial cracking of the code, through several researchers who chose to exclude the references to sexuality from their deciphered transcripts, up through Whitbread’s publication of that previously censored material. The nature of Lister’s sexuality was known as early as 1892 but was suppressed for almost a century after that, with each new researcher re-discovering and re-erasing it.

The discussion moves on to the history of Orr’s engagement with the material. Orr describes how each researcher presented the contents (and thus their version of Lister) differently. Although Whitbread published one volume focusing on the Paris trip, Orr views it as having marginalized the presence of Maria Barlow in favor of framing Mariana as Lister’s one grand passion.

Liddington drew from a wider variety of sources and focused on the larger social and political context of Lister’s life, as a mature woman. Liddington’s take on Lister’s sexuality has a negative tinge, touching on her manipulativeness and predatory reputation.

Green, who avoided touching on the explicit material, focused on Lister the traveler, drawing primarily from her correspondence rather than the focus on the diaries that others used.

Thus, previous work formed a patchwork, employing different subsets of the material and displaying different aspects of Lester’s life–ones that can almost seem to be different people. The section concludes by pointing out how this dynamic leaves space for a new, more integrated understanding of Lister that attempts to understand her within her own context, rather than fitting her into pre-existing theoretical frameworks.