Presenting the Past Book Reviews

Presenting the Past by Jill Liddington Book Summary

Pennine Pens was delighted to publish Presenting the Past in 1994. With a second edition in 2010, this path-breaking book has remained in print for over twenty years. So here for the very first time is a new eBook edition - making this Anne Lister classic easily available now for everyone throughout the world with an iPad, Kindle or other eBook reader.

Anne Lister - scholar, lesbian, diarist - owned and ran her Shibden Hall estate in Halifax. Her diaries run to four million words, much of it written in Anne’s own secret code. Presenting the Past told the dramatic story of how the Anne Lister diaries and letters survived after her death in 1840.

Here Jill Liddington recounts for the very first time how the code was deciphered in the 1890s - by John Lister who inherited Shibden. Once cracked, these coded passages revealed Anne Lister’s daring lesbian affairs. Since then, successive generations of editors and historians have discovered their own version of the extraordinary Anne Lister story.

Plunging the reader into the Archives in Halifax where the Shibden Hall papers are stored, Presenting the Past offered the very first critical reappraisal of these dramatically different images of Anne Lister - and asks how and why earlier editors selected their version?

Another book from Pennine Pens, also about Anne Lister is Nature’s Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire. This book has inspired several episodes of Sally Wainwright’s new TV drama series produced by Lookout Point (with BBC & HBO). This, the first full-length drama about Anne Lister, will be broadcast on BBC1 in 2019. Filming for the series starts at Shibden in May 2018.

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