The TL;DR of the TL;DR of Orr's Dissertation

This section, naturally, sums up the author’s purposes and results. Lister’s records had multiple functions. [Note: One hesitates to call them “purposes” as the functions likely emerged from the practice, rather than being a design feature.] The detailed and structured record of her activities, thoughts, and experiences create a type of autobiography, while at the same time not being designed as a literary work or coherent narrative. The function of her correspondence was to create and maintain a social network that included family, friends, and lovers.

Lister had multiple audiences for her writing, with different aspects being made available to different audiences. In the background – though not realized by Lister herself – was the idea of a publication for a general audience. [Note: Though Orr doesn’t point it out, that publication has been occurring over the last century, but with different filters than Lister would likely have applied.] Her family was a second audience, receiving news of Lister’s socializing and the carefully framed versions of her experiences that she had developed as her public face. Lister’s circle of lovers was a third audience, sharing various degrees of access to Lister’s letters and journal entries, either by Lister reading to them, or being given material to read, or in the most complete version, being given a key to the crypt hand – a privilege shared with only a few. Finally, Lister’s primary audience was herself. Content was recorded not only for the sake of having a record, but designed to be re-read, reviewed, extracted for other purposes, and enjoyed (sometimes erotically) at a later date.

These audiences cut across the different formats. Letters were not only private communications to share information, but could be used as personal references to indicate character, or to embody the degree to which her life was being shared with a third-party. The ways in which letters were extracted in journal entries mirror her never-realized thought of writing an epistolary novel about her relationship with Mariana.

The journal similarly cut across functions and audiences. Journal entries were expanded into letters. Selected journal material was read or shown to intimate friends. And the use of crypt hand recognized the reality that other eyes might view her journals and that she wanted to control what they had access to.

In summarizing her study, Orr reiterates that her interest was in Lister’s social and sexual practices, and in the ways the structure of Lister’s writing recorded information. This accounts for Orr’s interest in the physical objects (journals, letters) as well as the organization of different types of information (indexes, narrative, symbols, types of reference). Orr emphasizes that previous studies have not addressed the format-related aspect of the records, beyond a simplified understanding of the purpose of the crypt hand. Orr also emphasizes the interconnection between the different genres of Lister’s writing, in contrast to how previous researchers had focused on a single genre, be it journal or letters.

Lister’s deployment of crypt hand was complex in systematic ways, but it was not the only technique she used to add layers of meaning and interpretation to the written record. The various symbols used in journal entries and reflected in indexes tied together their several functions and created a graphic chart of her internal journey.

By exploring the dynamics of Lister’s social environment and interactions in Paris, we can place her romantic and erotic activities in their historic context, hoping to avoid viewing them through an anachronistic lens when isolated. Lister’s romantic adventures emerged out of a larger homosocial environment in which sociability, flattery, and flirtation could merge seamlessly into each other. In counterpoint, we see Madame de  Boyve’s efforts to create and enforce boundaries of sociability and sexuality (with the latter more obviously concerned with male-female relations), and how this deployed strategies of reputation and respectability.

In turn, Lister’s concerns around Barlow’s reputation and behavior perhaps inadvertently demonstrate the asymmetry of reputational concern: evaluating whether Barlow was “respectable” enough to engage in a relationship that, by its nature, was itself unrespectable.

An important part of the analysis is the very detailed chronology of the progression of Lister and Barlow’s relationship, and how each of them viewed the nature and dynamics of that relationship as they negotiated it. Each had pre-existing relationships that affected their willingness to commit and considerations that shaped how much they were willing to cede.

The enactment of a homosexual relationship, from initial flirtation to the never-realized “going to Italy” had many intermediate steps, each with its own vocabulary and behavioral definitions. And Lister was not the only one who initiated such explorations. Barlow was the first to raise the issue of lesbianism in conversation, with her reference to Marie-Antoinette’s reputation. Miss MacKenzie used her classical education to inquire about Lister’s gender presentation. Lister’s briefer flirtation with de Sans was meaningful enough that they continued corresponding after Paris. Although Lister and Barlow’s relationship did not produce the marriage that both indicated they wanted, Barlow joined the select set of lovers that Lister continue to correspond with regularly. Orr rejects the image that she finds in Whitbread’s writings of Mariana as Listers’ one true grand passion, after which all other relationships were cynical and mercenary. Rather, in Lister’s relation of her sexual history to Barlow, Orr sees in an array of different relationships that reflect Lister’s changing understanding of her own desires, both sexual and social.

Finally, Orr draws parallels in Lister’s textual self fashioning to literary genres of her own era, such as the journalistic and epistolary novels of Rousseau or the autobiographical poetry of Byron – both of whom figure in Lister’s reading lists. Lister’s writing reflects both the Romantic movement in its focus on sentiment and eroticism, and the Enlightenment in its fascination with measuring, recording, and analyzing the details of her history and experience. All this works to reinforce an understanding of Lister as rooted in her own time and place, and not some aberrant precursor of 20th century lesbian identity.

There is a brief coda, noting that Lister and Barlow did meet again in two years’ time, as promised, on the occasion when Lister (now the inheritor of Shibden Hall) traveled to Paris with her Aunt Anne. Lister spent a year and a half in Paris on that trip, in the midst of which she and of the Barlow’s (mother and daughter) literally “went to Italy” as well as visiting Switzerland.

Orr finishes by suggesting topics worth further study, such as tracing Lister and Barlow’s later interactions, studying Listers’ “safer sex “” practices (which evidently were successful in preventing her from transmitting her disease to Barlow, or later to Ann Walker), studying the dynamics of Lister’s lifelong friendship with Isabella Norcliffe, a study of Lister’s reading (carefully recorded throughout her journals), and a more comprehensive study of Lster’s symbols and marks used to index content of interest.