"Hail to the Chief": Music as Persona in the Life of Anne Lister (1791-1840)

“Hail to the Chief”: Music as persona in the life of Anne Lister (1791-1840)<br> <br>With the recent dramatization of segments of her diaries for the BBC/HBO series, <i>Gentleman Jack</i>, Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax, Yorkshire has become something of a celebrity. Scholarly research, however, has focused mostly on Lister as a Lesbian lover or her literary identity as diarist. <br> At a time when close relationships between women were commonplace and caused little social comment, especially if those women were married with children, why did (the admittedly unmarried) Lister attract comment among her social set and the wider community where to her face she was described as “singular” and behind her back as an “oddity,” or “unnatural,” attracting the derogatory sobriquet “Gentleman Jack”? Careful reading of Lister’s diaries reveals a woman with a prodigious intellect, educated and self-educated in “masculine” disciplines such as Latin, Greek, mathematics, engineering, and medicine. A self-described “tomboy” as a child, in womanhood Lister developed (as far as social conventions would allow) a masculine style of dress so far removed from typical female attire as to cause strangers to stare. These choices helped Lister construct what Carl Jung refers to as the <i>persona</i> – the mask a person develops to mediate between the ego (or center of consciousness) and the outer world; a mask that I argue in Lister’s case included music.<br> Little scholarly attention has been paid to Lister’s references to music in her diaries. She received education in music as a child and continued this study into adulthood. As was common at the time, evenings with friends frequently involved playing and singing for each other’s entertainment which Lister often records faithfully in her journal. Her close acquaintances included William Priestly (1779-1860), founder of the Halifax Choral Society (1817), and she was an enthusiastic audience member for professional concerts and the opera. In this paper I will show how the details of Lister’s musical choices as recorded in her writings (including singing such “masculine” works as “Hail to the Chief” and playing the flute – then considered unsuitable for a woman) are an integral and important part of her carefully curated persona.<br> <br>FORMAT: Paper (20 minutes duration plus 10 minutes for questions)<br> <br> <br> <br>