Presenting The Past

More about the book

Pennine Pens proudly published Presenting the Past in 1994, with a second edition following in 2010. This groundbreaking work has remained in print for over twenty years, and now a new eBook edition makes it accessible worldwide on devices like iPads and Kindles. Anne Lister, a scholar, lesbian, and diarist, managed her Shibden Hall estate in Halifax and left behind an extensive diary of four million words, much of it in her secret code. Presenting the Past narrates the remarkable journey of how Lister's diaries and letters survived after her death in 1840. For the first time, Jill Liddington details how John Lister, her heir, deciphered the code in the 1890s, uncovering Lister's bold lesbian relationships. Subsequent editors and historians have since explored different facets of Anne Lister's life. The book immerses readers in the Halifax Archives, where the Shibden Hall papers are preserved, offering a critical reassessment of the varied portrayals of Lister and questioning the choices made by earlier editors. Additionally, another book from Pennine Pens, Nature’s Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire, has inspired episodes of Sally Wainwright’s upcoming TV drama series, the first full-length drama about Lister, set to air on BBC1 in 2019, with filming commencing at Shibden in May 2018.