It's not often I read two biographies of the same person straight off- but Anne Choma's version focussed on one bit of Anne Lister's life ...and ended before she and Miss Walker embarked on their amazing journey to the Caucasus.
This version looks at the whole of Lister's life through her vast and detailed diary collection. From her first love affair with a girl at school, her aspirations to cultivate well-to-do friends to help her rise socially, her ambitions for wealth and status (often hampered by limited funds) and her quite fascinating drive, determination and intellect.
I think I gained a much better overall image of Lister from Steidele's work...and the constant quotes from her diary. Compelling though she was, I don't think anyone could regard her in a majorly positive light. Indeed Steidele considers her "a beast of a woman" and she was certainly a female Don Juan:
"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..."
So, quite a cad, as she pusues her conquests for money and sex, stringing them along with lies and omissions.
Was interested to read how the Brontes knew of her (a near neighbor); Steidele considers her an influence on Charlotte's unfeminine 'Shirley' and considers the mad Creole Mrs Rochester in ''Jane Eyre' to have been inspired by Lister's first schoolgirl love- mixed-race Eliza Raine, who ended up in an asylum for the insane.
Lister was certainly an intrepid and fearless traveller, climbing unconquered mountains and crossing the wilds of Russia in 1840 into the unheard of depths of Azerbaijan and Georgia.
I also hadnt realised just how extensive were her diaries,containing an almost obsessive amount of minutiae ("in their egocentric indiscrimination, they foreshadow the banal uniquity of the selfie."). They have not all been transcribed: a proposed attempt was abandoned when it was realised that the 4 million words would take 9 years!
Totally fascinating! ( )