Sally Wainright’s Gentleman Jack, a television series based on the 19th-century diarist, landowner, and “first [recorded] modern lesbian,” Anne Lister, is coming back in a matter of days! The team behind the hit show recently teased the beginning of season 2, coming to BBC and UK Sapphics on April 10th, with a trailer. It has yet to be announced when this new season will be available to those of us outside of the UK. We are hoping we won’t have to wait more than a few weeks!
The trailer adds to Anne Lister’s (Suranne Jones) myth and legend with the other characters’ testimonies voicing a montage of Lister’s staunch strides and take-no-prisoners attitude. “Not everyone’s a force of nature like she is,” the first says.
“She likes anything to do with medicine or mathematics, and all the things women aren’t supposed to be interested in,” Marian Lister adds.
When new wives Anne Lister and Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle) share a horse and carriage with a male stranger, Ann even spruiks her beloved in her presence. She tells the man that Anne dissected a baby once. Both Ann(e)s quickly clarify that the baby was dead.
Anne Lister and Ann Walker are still together after their newly-taken vows but there’s controversy, in the trailer, surrounding the two women living together. A man accuses Anne of “having a hold” on Ann Walker. “We are the only people in the whole world who want us to be together,” Anne Lister says to her wife.
Anne Lister’s self-assuredness is rare in depictions of women on the screen, let alone portrayals of real-life lesbians who stood their ground in the 1800s. Anne Lister was unwavering, going as far as to ordain her own lesbian marriage (in a church!) centuries before it was considered legal. She didn’t require society’s acceptance to trust what she knew was right, even if it was absolutely contrary to popular opinion.
In the trailer, faced with criticism – especially from men – Anne responds, “If I were a man, and thank heaven and providence that I’m not, would you even think to question my ambition?”
The real Anne Lister contributed to her own mythologization by writing her diaries in code. Season 2 highlights her character in Gentleman Jack doing the same, ending with Anne saying, “I fear, in your mind, you’ve built me up to be all things I’m not… and some that I am.”
Anne Lister’s diaries suited director Sally Wainwright, who, in an interview with The Guardian, said she was tired of traditional screen adaptations of historical stories. “There has been this slavish adaptation of things like Jane Austen, which I just find irrelevant…They seem to be obsessed with: ‘Can you find a man? Are you pretty enough to find a rich man?’ As if that’s all women care about. It leaves me cold…I didn’t want it to be another dressing-up-box drama…I wanted to create the feeling that we are following her around, that she’s always slightly ahead of us.”
Anne Lister’s confidence in the face of heteropatriarchy has inspired other women to take more risks, too. “One woman had been housebound with agoraphobia – but after watching it [Gentleman Jack], gathered the courage to walk to the shop for the first time in years.”
