Regency landowner, seducer and secret diarist, the book is a triumph of truth over fantasy. Anne Lister led an extraordinary, pioneering life, a woman who lived and loved as she pleased. It is of course the inspiration for the BBC TV drama series. Lister's journals were so shocking that the first person to crack their secret code hid them behind a fake panel in his ancestral home. Anne Lister was an intrepid world traveller and an unabashed lover of other women. In this bold new biography, prizewinning author Angela Steidele uses the diaries to create a portrait of Anne as we've never seen her before - a woman in some ways very much ahead of her time. Anne recorded everything from the most intimate details of her numerous amorous liaisons through to her plans to make her fortune by exploiting the coal seams under her family estate in Halifax, and her reaction to the Peterloo massacre. Selfish to the core, it seemed that her lover Ann Walker's fortune was Anne Lister's main aim and it is sad to read how things went after the marriage and their amazing journey to the Caucasus. The diaries cover Anne's first love affair with a girl at her school, her aspirations to rise socially and cultivate well-to-do friends, how her ambitions for wealth and status were often hampered by limited funds, and how her extraordinary drive and determination and intellect show her in a more positive light. But she was in her biographers' words 'a beast of a woman'. 'Anne had renewed her vows with Mariana three times, seduced Miss Vallance and Nantz Belcombe, slept countless times with Isabella Norcliffe, flirted with Harriet Milne, Lou Belbombe and Francis Pickford, spent a long time living in Paris with Maria Barlow and then a few weeks with Mme de Rosny. During all these entanglements, Sibella Maclean had been an iron in the fire...' Anne strung along her lovers with lies and omissions and her reputation may well have interested the Brontë sisters. Charlotte's unfeminine 'Shirley' and the mad Creole Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre may have been inspired by Anne Lister's first schoolgirl lover - mixed-race Eliza Raine who ended up in an insane asylum. Anne Lister climbed unconquered mountains and crossed the wilds of Russia in 1840 into the unheard depths of Azerbaijan and Georgia. The diaries have run to four million words! With illustrations and maps, 328pp, paperback.
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