I Know My Own Heart: Anne Lister of Shibden Hall (1791–1840) | LGBTQ+ History Sleep Story
Drift off to sleep learning about Anne Lister, the Yorkshire landowner, traveller and diarist often called "the first modern lesbian," who recorded her entire life in a secret code and waited two hundred years to be read.
Born in 1791 and mistress of Shibden Hall above Halifax, Anne Lister wrote roughly five million words of diary across her lifetime, and about a sixth of it in what she called her "crypthand," a cipher built from the Greek alphabet and algebraic symbols, invented as a teenager to write to her first love, Eliza Raine, at school in York. In those coded pages she wrote, in…
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