Gentleman Jack: Really more of a book review than a scholarly analysis
Wednesday, March 26, 2025 - 21:30
When I have a bunch of items written up in advance, I usually like to space them out to give the appearance of having a regular blog schedule. But the way life has gone lately, if I don't roll these out one after the other, I have half a chance of forgetting entirely that I've written them up. Life is just fighting with one bureaucracy after another these days. Still trying to get all my retirement ducks in a row. Only 35 days to go and some of those ducks are still running around quacking.
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Choma, Anne. 2019. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister. Penguin Books, New York. ISBN 978-0-14-313456-5
I don’t usually consume books for the blog via audiobook -- makes it hard to take notes! It made sense in this case because it’s more of a narrative history rather than a scholarly analysis. As such, this is more in the line of a book review than my usual factual summary.
This is a narrative history of Anne Lister’s life between November 1831 and March 1834, the period covered by the tv series Gentleman Jack. The book was written specifically as a companion to the tv series, giving the actual details of Anne’s life during that period, which differs in various details from the tv series. (The tv series both omitted and invented significant details.) Interspersed in the narrative are extensive quotes from Anne’s diaries.
The account is very readable and will give you a solid background of Anne’s life and times. It is neither a scholarly historical analysis (for that, you might try Jill Liddington) nor an extensive and contextualized survey of significant portions of the diaries (for which you want Helena Whitbread). But it hits a sweet spot for the general reader. And if you’re a fan of the tv series, it makes an interesting “compare and contrast” to understand how history gets adapted for the requirements of drama.
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