I sometimes make joking reference to the "industry of Anne Lister studies" but it's hard to exaggerate the value of Lister's candid diaries for disrupting theory-based understandings of 18-19th century female homosexuality. We need to be careful not to assume that Lister's experience is universal, nor to treat it as unique. Many women, no doubt, wrote candid private diaries and correspondence that may have expressed their negotiation of homoerotic desires. Vast amounts of women's private writing have been deliberately destroyed by their families after death "to preserve their privacy and reputation." We know for a fact that Lister's diaries came close to being destroyed at various points in their transmission. And, as noted in this article, we know for a fact that Lister was deliberately dishonest in her public presentation with regard to same-sex desires.
But conversely, we see Lister considering and choosing amoung a variety of possible understandings of her own life and desires. And we shouldn't assume that all women would have had the same understandings and made the same choices in how they modeled their lives. If anything, the individual agency in constructing a self-identity that Clark examines here--and the absense of "official" public models for that identity--argues for the likelihood that women who desired women would have had a variety of understandings and identities.
I sometimes get nervous about the "Lister Studies Industry" and the way that modern pop culture has fixated on specific aspects of her performance and re-framed them in modern terms. (For example, I've encountered Lister fans interpreting her "masculine dress" as meaning she wore trousers, even though it's clear from the diaries themselves that this was not the case.) Surely one of the lessons of the treasure that is Lister's diaries is that we need to enjoy the complex contradictory variety that is historic lesbian experience, rather than trying to envision women in the past as being exactly like us.
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