‘The Art of Travelling Requires an Apprenticeship’: Anne Lister’s Diaries and Travel

Travel is key to Anne Lister's story: it shaped her experience of the world and her sense of self. It has also played an important part in shaping her posthumous reputation: famously, she was the first amateur to climb the Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838, and she died on one of her most ambitious journeys, to Russia, in 1840. Yet her travels, and her approach to undertaking and writing about her journeys at home and abroad, deserve more scholarly attention than they have hitherto attracted. This chapter highlights the potential of the large amount of unpublished material in her diaries relating to travel (now becoming more accessible through transcription and digital resources). Citing examples from Lister's home tours in the 1820s, I argue that a distinctive female voice such as Lister's is an important, but until now neglected, element in the recovery of female travel writing, which has been a recent focus for scholars. While her importance to LGBTQ+ history cannot be underestimated, changing social attitudes which made possible the publication of decoded passages of Lister's diaries since the 1980s have shifted focus away from other interesting aspects of her life. To understand her life fully we need, I suggest, to investigate more closely how her diaries can be read as life writing and travel writing. Whilst in many ways extraordinary texts, Lister's writing about travel can be understood in the context of other contemporary travelogues where the boundaries of class and gender are revealed through the writer's interaction with place. Anne Lister's travels through Britain helped her explore her own character as well as gain practical experience; as she noted in July 1822: 'The art of travelling requires an apprenticeship.'