Something very special is going on in the real life story of Anne Lister of Halifax in the BBC’s production of Gentleman Jack now on BBC iPlayer. Filming the story on location at Anne Lister's real home Shibden Hall in Yorkshire really adds another dimension. It's not just that if you love the series you can go and visit the place where it was filmed and get in on the action yourself (well, almost). It's that the house has so much of the character of Anne herself.
Gentleman Jack focuses on the relationship between Anne Lister and her neighbour, Ann Walker, in the 1830s. Anne Lister was a landowner, respected as a local business woman, an enthusiastic traveller and a pioneering mountaineer. You’d think this would be enough of a legacy but the waters of history had pretty well closed over her head until a PhD student translated her coded diaries. What the diaries revealed of Anne Lister’s life has given her a new, very contemporary celebrity as the writer of what author Emma Donoghue has called “the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history”. And yes, her neighbours really did call her "Gentleman Jack'. Now the success of the BBC series has brought her firmly to public attention as a woman who had the courage to flout contemporary expectations of a woman’s role in early 19th century England.
Anne Lister inherited Shibden Hall near Halifax from her aunt and uncle. It gave her sufficient income to ensure a level of independence unusual for a Regency woman. She retained this independence by running her estate with noticeable commercial acumen, by refusing to give up her property rights by marrying a man and by setting up home with an heiress, Ann Walker. All this is captured in the television series. Best of all, the screen also captures Anne Lister’s real setting. She first came to live at Shibden Hall in 1826 and began a series of improvements in 1830, employing architect John Harper to add a gothic tower and underground extensions to improve the servant’s quarters. In the gardens she commissioned Samuel Gray to design new landscaped grounds that would include fashionable terraces, rockeries and a boating lake. A bit of a snob, she had all the Victorian love of ancestry and wanted to underline her family’s long lineage at a time when industrial wealth was bringing ‘nouveau riche’ families to the social scene. She kept the distinctive black and white timbering of the medieval house first built by wool merchant William Otes in 1420 and restored the full height of his Great Hall. Even though the Listers only came to Shibden in 1615, she was retaining a visible link with a medieval past. All these improvements created a house that was stylish but clearly ancient, a worthy setting for an ambitious but eccentric gentlewoman of good pedigree. Later generations of Listers did little to the house before handing it over to Calderdale Council in 1933.
The house looks much as it does on the television series, bar the bedroom and study which were recreated in a studio. It clearly makes a difference in such a character-led story to be where the events actually happened. For Suranne Jones, who plays Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack, “filming in Anne Lister’s actual house just blows your mind”. Writer, Sally Wainwright spent many years trying to bring the story of Anne Lister to the screen, she says “I love Shibden Hall. It really is the most sublime place on earth”. There is something undeniably authentic about the whole production, strong female characters in a production dominated by female talent but the character of Shibden Hall, as tough and eccentric as its owner, shines through as well. Go today and stroll through the rooms where Anne Lister lived at Shibden Hall, when you visit the grounds she created, you can even go boating on her lake.