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On television, British costume dramas take the form of dressed-up soap operas or rom-coms cribbed from great literature: the legendary Upstairs, Downstairs, the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice, the smash international hit Downton Abbey, North & South. They offer the ridiculous fashions, social mores, and dancing of a bygone age, safe from the perch of your sofa; Elizabeth Bennet’s tribulations are much less troubling when you know she’ll safely end up Mrs. Darcy.
Gentleman Jack, airing its second episode tonight on HBO, is a different kind of period piece. Its heroine is Anne Lister—a politically conservative, coal-mining, sidepiece-juggling lesbian. That term barely existed in 1832, when the show is set; certainly, it’s unknown to the barely literate peasant farmers that till Anne’s land and pay her rents. And yet practically in plain sight, Anne had sexual and romantic affairs with multiple women; secretly married one; and in the meantime, became a well-regarded businesswoman in Halifax.
Creator Sally Wainwright—a Halifax native, who also writes and directs the show—tells me she has been hoping to make a show about Lister for 20 years: “She did all these amazing things, but the most extraordinary thing of all is that she wrote it all down into extraordinary detail.” Lister meticulously recorded the details of her life, and took the precaution of detailing her love affairs in an elaborate code. “I mean, the diary is vast. You can’t underestimate how huge this diary is. Five million words, 27 volumes, 300 pages in every volume,” Wainwright said. It wasn’t until 1988 that Lister’s secret became public knowledge, and her diaries are still being decoded.
The relationships detailed within the diaries present a world far at odds with the social norms of polite Regency-era society. Anne Lister “was a real player,” Wainwright said. “She says in the diary, ‘I know how to please the ladies,’ and she did. She slept with a lot of women.”
Lister’s relationships spanned many years, and often bridged her partners’ marriages to men. She was heartbroken when one lover, Mariana Belcombe, married a man, Charles Lawton, for his fortune. But that didn’t stop her from accompanying the newlyweds on their honeymoon, as female companions of the bride often did—or from bedding Mariana’s sister during the trip.
A film adaptation of Lister’s story, 2010’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, starred Maxine Peake as Anne during a slightly earlier—and more messily romantic—period of her life. Gentleman Jack enters Lister’s life at the age of 41—at the tail end of her youthful romances, and at the point where Anne wanted to settle down. Suranne Jones, who worked with Wainwright on ITV dramas Unforgiven and Scott & Bailey, plays Anne—complete with her black, mannish clothing, haughty demeanor, and a top hat. (“We don’t think that she actually wore a top hat,” Jones says to me. “But that’s poetic license.”)
For Jones, who studied volumes of text written on Lister, the character’s age was part of the appeal. “There’s just no other character like her. I’m 40, and to have a character like that at 40 is—you know, I’m not the wife or I’m not the mistress. I’m a real, full-bodied, kick-ass, extraordinary woman,” she said.
The show begins with Anne’s return to her estate, Shibden Hall—the house that the real Anne Lister lived in, which is now a museum in Halifax. With Mariana out of the picture, Anne was even more determined to have a wife of her own—someone she could not only be romantically attached to, but someone who would also be her lifelong partner. As it happened, a wealthy young heiress lived on a nearby estate: Ann Walker, played by Sophie Rundle. With a wry look at the camera—another distinction that differentiates Gentleman Jack from other period dramas—Jones’s Anne sets out to seduce her. (It’s very forward; Sophie Gilbert noted in the Atlantic that the courtship is “written almost as a kind of grooming.”)
“[Lister] identified herself, really, with men. She set out to find a wife—a wealthy wife. That’s what men did, then, and that’s how she saw herself,” Wainwright said, adding, “She put a lot of hours in” her pursuit of Ann Walker.
In real life, Lister constructed a secluded retreat on her property where she could court Ann Walker at her leisure. The chaumiere, or “moss house,” corresponded appropriately with a nickname Lister picked up in York: “tuft-hunter.”
In the show, Anne pursues Ann in a saucy, titillating, forward courtship—one that delights in upending the viewer’s expectations about befrilled women sitting in drawing rooms. They kiss and sigh in those drawing rooms instead, heedless of stuffy, elderly callers that might drop in. Ann Walker’s cloistered life was taken by storm. “[Lister] often said that when women fell in love with her, they didn’t really understand what was happening to them,” Wainwright said. “They didn’t know you could do that.” But though Walker may have been taken by surprise, Wainwright said, “Ann Walker was besotted with Anne Lister—she was absolutely dazzled by her.” Walker had a youthful fixation on the proud, independent woman she’d met only once before, as a teenager; when Anne Lister came back into her life, “it was like a rock star, walking in.”
Gentleman Jack seems fond of its setting—but at times, the show sends up its own period, ruffling the feathers of an orderly, prim society. The awful hairstyles of 1832, with their precise, tight curls over the ears and prim, matronly center parts, seem designed to be mussed in the throes of passion. Jones said that when filming the romantic scenes with Rundle, the two had to work to find comfortable, casual poses under rigid layers of fabric. There was another unexpected side effect, too.
“When you’re in corsets, there’s quite a lot of gurgling noises and wind-breaking that goes on because you’re all so restricted,” Jones said. “I’d lean in to kiss Sophie, and go [burp noise]. Oh, sorry. Oh my goodness. Where did that come from? Or, [fart noise]. You know?”
Lister had a vision of queer married life that has only recently become socially acceptable—a committed, loving relationship between two women sharing their resources and their time. Lister was eager to enlist Walker’s fortune toward a new scheme, one that Gentleman Jack spends a lot of time on: mining coal, at great risk, but for great profit. The subplot is an indication of her brilliance and fortitude—but also a glimpse into how different her values were of many contemporary viewers. Industry and profit was what galvanized her; the fervor for Parliamentary reform, which would eventually expand voting rights, didn’t interest her in the slightest. Wainwright calls her a “bright blue Tory,” the U.K. version of a red-stater.
“There are aspects of her character that are hard to love,” Wainwright observed. “Some people are going to be totally disappointed, because she’s not a feminist heroine, by any means. She believed in her own interests, not women’s.”
Her haughtiness, in fact, earned her a nickname—and the show, its title. “She was such a snob,” Wainwright said. “And ‘jack’ was slang for ‘dyke’—it was the equivalent of ‘dyke.’” In Halifax’s oral tradition, the term “gentleman jack” was passed down as a derogatory label for Lister. “It wasn’t a compliment,” Wainwright said. “But she’s the kind of person who would take an insult and turn it into a compliment anyway.”
For Wainwright, it’s this force of character that makes Anne so remarkable—warts and all. “If a man tells me I’m wrong, I’m like, yeah, I’m wrong,” she said, laughing at her own timidity. “Something happens, and I just worry about it for the next six weeks.”
But Anne? “She had the heart of a lion.”
