Anne Lister seduced scores of women and recorded every detail in her diaries, using a secret code of her own devising to conceal them
Throughout her life, Anne Lister marked orgasms in her diary with an ‘x’, and masturbation with a ‘+’. She calls her sexual encounters either ‘kisses’ or ‘grubbling’ and refers to the vulva as a ‘queer’ – an epithet that’s not recorded anywhere else. Maria Barlow regularly allowed Anne to ‘grubble’ her ‘queer’ through her petticoats as they lay in bed together. On the night of her marriage to Ann Walker, Anne records ‘three xxxs better to her than to me’.













