Gentleman Jack: The Life and Times of Anne Lister, by Anne Choma. This past March I watched the HBO television series Gentleman Jack, which is based on the life of Regency landowner, industrialist, voracious learner, intrepid traveller, trailblazing lesbian, and exhaustive diarist Anne Lister, and it was one of the best period pieces I have ever seen. Suranne Jones plays Anne Lister like a force of nature, and I loved that Anne wasn't presented as a saint or anachronistically progressive, and that her sister Marian was an intelligent and insightful person whom Anne underestimated. The costuming and sets were excellent, and it's always nice to see Gemma Jones as well as some other other British actors I recognized from other shows. In June I watched the series again, and when I found myself wanting to know more about Anne Lister, I read the book the show was based on. I rather wished I'd read one of the other autobiographies in existence on Lister instead, as this book was primarily concerned with Anne Lister's courtship of Ann Walker just as the show was, and I wanted a fuller picture of her life, but it is a very good book in its own right. It gives an unflinching portrait of Anne who, fascinating as she is, would not have been an easy person to live with, or even the most likable person. Extraordinarily intelligent and gifted people with whirlwind levels of physical and mental energy do tend to leave the rest of us battening down our hatches as best we can, and though Anne was at least a century and a half ahead of her time in her own understanding and acceptance of a sexuality she didn't even have terms to describe, and in her determination to build a life with a committed partner, she was well behind it, even medieval, in her outlook on other sociopolitical issues, such as that of labour rights.
Now, just a note about the status of these book reports. Obviously, I am very late with this book report, and I've only read two books in the last two months (that I remember -- I have a dim yet horrible feeling that I read one or two others and just didn't document my thoughts at the time and now can't remember them), but there's a reason for that. Since mid-May I've been working on writing a novel, and it is absorbing not only my writing time, but my reading time as well, as I need to do research for it. It'll be some months before that will change, so I won't make any empty promises about future book reports for the rest of this year. However, I am hoping to get time to work on the list of essays I've been wanting to write, so there may some things in the pipeline for this blog.
