‘Gentleman Jack’ Creator Sally Wainwright On The Fascinating Life Of Anne Lister, Lesbian Trailblazer

In HBO’s Gentleman Jack, the story of 19th-century landowner and prolific lesbian diarist Anne Lister (Suranne Jones) comes to life in fascinating and often moving ways. The series, which picks up in 1832 when Lister returns to her home at Shibden Hall in the Yorkshire town of Halifax in England, introduces us to a bold, quick-witted, extremely intelligent character whose love of life, learning, and of women serve as the guiding forces of some of her biggest tragedies and triumphs.

It’s a period piece with a twist, eschewing the norm; there are no languorous shots of the dreary countryside, no boring melodrama which lacks depth. Instead, Gentleman Jack aims to turn the genre on its head, portraying a new kind of love affair (at least for the time in which Lister lived) and a thoroughly modern woman whose life and passions defied expectations.

Decider sat down to talk with Gentleman Jack writer, director, producer, and creator Sally Wainwright, whose passion for Lister led to the creation of one of the most original and exciting series to grace our screens in recent memory.

DECIDER: Anne Lister is a bit of a conundrum. She has so many qualities that are a bit boorish and off-putting, at least for the period in which she lived. And yet, so many people seemed to love her. What was it like bringing such a vivid, complex character to the screen?

SALLY WAINWRIGHT: The fact that there is a darker side to her dawns on you rather more slowly [when you’re reading her diaries] and it never put me off because I just found her fascinating. History is complex and she lived in a completely different time to us, so I just found it interesting that there were so many contradicting parts of her. As a dramatist, that complexity does appeal to me.

Some people part company with Anne Lister when they find out she employed children to work down her mines, but I think it’s a conversation to be had whether we should judge people who lived 200 years ago by 2019 standards and I think it’s unfair to do that. What fascinates me about Anne Lister was that while she was so far ahead of her time in respect to her sexuality, she was very much a product of her time in other ways. I think the way that people are responding to her on screen, very much the majority of people seem absolutely fascinated by her. I think it’s quite refreshing in some ways to not to have to be politically correct and stick to the true story that was.

From the response you’ve received thus far, do you feel like the audience is really “getting” Anne Lister in the ways you hoped they would?

I think there are some subtleties that some people are missing a little bit with Anne Lister. Many of them see her as a rich, upper-class landowner but she wasn’t. She was a landowner, yes, but it was a very modest sized estate. She wasn’t cash rich at all; she was always wondering where the next five Pounds were coming from and she did have a lot to contend with in her life. She had to make that estate pay; it wasn’t just a hobby she needed to make a living, so she was responding to the world as it existed in her time.

We’ve talked about Anne Lister being ahead of her time, but what do you think she’d be like if she actually was alive in 2019?

It’s very interesting to speculate! When we talk about her being ahead of her time, I think the crux of that is just how intelligent she was. She was profoundly clever and she had a very healthy sense of her own self-worth. She believed her homosexuality was God-given and she thought it was against nature if she slept with a man. She thought God had intended her to be like this and I think that, combined with her very powerful intellect, allowed her to have that confidence about who she was and that’s what can make her seem ahead of her time.

I think if she was alive now, she would be in a very powerful position. I think she’d be Prime Minister and be doing a better job of Brexit than anyone else! Or, she’d be the CEO of a very big organization. Anne Lister is famous for being a prolific lesbian diaries, but when you get to know her as I have done over the last 20 years, what really jumps out at you time and time again is just how clever she was. She had an extraordinary mind; she was very inquisitive she was able to process complex information very quickly and if she was alive now, the world would be her oyster … I was talking to Jill Liddington, the historian who wrote Female Fortune, the book that first inspired me to write Gentleman Jack, and she has this great phrase about Anne which was that she would always be three thoughts ahead of anyone else in the room. You have to raise your game when you meet people like that, and that is what I wanted to create with Anne Lister—you have to raise your game just to watch her.

You’ve worked with Suranne Jones, who does a wonderful job of bringing Lister to life, on three previous occasions, so you’re obviously confident in her abilities as an actor. However, was there a certain quality or qualities she brought to this role that made you think, “Ah yes, she’s perfect!”?

There are many qualities she brings to the role, but to be honest, I didn’t even think of Suranne at first. I think of Suranne as a very contemporary actress, but then ultimately it was that contemporaneous quality that she has that made me think, ‘This is her!’ This is a woman out of time almost, but when Suranne came in to read for us, what really blew me away when she came in to read was how quickly her mind works. She embraced and she ‘got’ Anne very very quickly. Anne can be a very very complex person to get to know and she kind of embraced that. It wasn’t just the ebullience and the physical aspect��[Suranne’s] very athletic like Anne was—but it was more the nuance stuff, the brain that could get her head around anything and use it her mind was jumping around from one thing to another.

Suranne’s got a really wonderful actorly instinct and insights. We gave each other a long time to rehearse for this because it’s such a complex character and we wanted to make sure we were unearthing everything we could. The deeper we went into things, Suranne would be telling me things about Anne Lister that I didn’t know—me having studied Anne Lister for 20 years! There were instinctive emotional choices, based on the script, based on the reading about Anne Lister that she made that just worked. She’s got this very intense emotional insight about how human beings tick and that was just very exciting. It was very exciting for me as a director because it meant our rehearsal process was just incredibly creative. It was one of the most enjoyable stimulating things I’ve ever worked on, just rehearsing with Suranne, bringing this extraordinary person to life. I mean she just totally owned her. When I see her on screen now, I’m as awe struck as anyone. I think it’s just the most majestic, magnificent performance.

Lister kept scrupulous diaries from the time she was 15 years old. Why did you choose to focus Gentleman Jack on this particular period of her life?

I chose this period because I think this is when she really came into her own, I think this is when she became the woman that she was destined to become. She was in her prime when she got into her forties and it was also quite a dramatic period in her life because she was heartbroken when she left Hastings and it was quite a blow to her. It really became apparent to her that she had to find someone to settle down with and she would not settle down with a man. She’d inherited Shibden so she had the responsibility of making the estate pay. She went back to Shibden determined to do just that and to find a wife. By this point in her life, she was spinning a lot of plates and she was very confident about who she was. That was appealing to me. The earlier years were very much about her chasing women and that’s interesting up to a point but then it gets quite same-y.

Well, speaking of chasing women, we know that Anne Lister was quite a passionate lover and that element has come into play in Gentleman Jack, but in quite a tasteful way and certainly not performed for the male gaze, as many lesbian characters and storylines on screen have been.

I wanted to dramatize the fact that she was a great lover—and we certainly see moments of great passion and intensity—but I was really keen not to make it gratuitous and not to have any more nudity than was necessary to tell the story. I think the most graphic scene is the one in Episode 2, the three-second flashback to the relationship with Mrs. Barlow in Paris. I thought it was important to show that, but we spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to show and what we didn’t want to show and how graphic we didn’t want to be and how much you can convey the intensity and nature of those relationships without resorting to endless images of nudity where actors really have to expose themselves. I didn’t want to do that—I wanted to tell the story in a way that didn’t titillate. It’s so easy for people to pick up on that and say the wrong things about your drama, and it was very important for me not to go down that route.

Anne Lister could be quite stern and cold, but it does very much seem as though she had this secret soft side. It’s almost as if she was a secret romantic, even if she wouldn’t admit it!

Shes incredibly in touch with her own emotions. I think the thing about her at the time when she lived is that she had to develop this tough outward carapace so that people couldn’t see how vulnerable she was underneath because she would get called the vilest names in Halifax. She had to [be tough] so that people couldn’t touch her, people wouldn’t even dare look at her. She developed this hard hard exterior and what’s so moving and touching when you get to know her really well is that she was a real lover. She was in love with being in love she was a real romantic underneath this dominant exterior. It’s one of those exciting contradictions about her and why she’s exciting to dramatize and why she was exciting for Suranne to play. There are so many exciting contrasts to her.

In Gentleman Jack, we see the frustrations Lister experienced in her relationship with Ann Walker, whose own mental and emotional struggles meant she sort of messed Anne Lister about a bit. Why do you think Anne stuck around? Was it true love? The desire for Ann Walker’s money? The fear of being alone?

I think it’s a combination of all those things. What’s fascinating to me in the diaries was the number of times Anne Lister would walk away from Crow Nest [Ann Walker’s residence] and say ‘I’m never going back there again!’ and then the next day she would return. This went on and on and on! At the age of 40, she wanted to settle down and this was a very very good prospect for her.

I think she was also someone who was very tenacious, not just in this matter but in all matters. She often said to Anne Walker things along the lines of ‘you don’t know me well enough if you think I’m just going to give up because I never give up on anything.’

And yet, we see that the relationship certainly wasn’t just one-sided. Ann Walker was truly taken by Anne Lister.

Oh, Ann Walker was absolutely dazzled by Anne Lister. She was utterly starstruck by her, she was besotted by her. It’s really clear between the lines of the journal that this girl was passionately in love with this other woman, even though she didn’t know what that meant at first.

I think that what also emerges as the relationship continues is that they were actually quite equal to each other in a bizarre sort of way. At first, you feel like it’s a relationship about strength manipulating weakness, but what becomes more apparent as the relationship continues is that she really knew how to control Anne Lister. It wasn’t an unequal relationship; Ann Walker always had the power of knowing that she was the one with money and she never let go of that. There are times when you kinda feel sorry for Anne Lister because, in an odd sort of way, she had met her match!

We still have several episodes ahead of us, but can you tell us whether the finale will provide any sense of closure or if there’s perhaps room for telling more stories from Anne’s life?

Where this series ends, it has a very beautiful conclusion. At the same time, it’s only the start and what comes after it gets bigger and bolder and exciting, so I’d certainly hope there’s certainly more story to tell and it would be my greatest pleasure to do so.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Stream Gentleman Jack on HBO