'Gentleman Jack': A Different Sort of Regency Romance

I love, & only love, the fairer sex & thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs… Anne Lister/Gentleman Jack

Anne Lister, diarist, mountaineer, and explorer (1791–1840), nicknamed Gentleman Jack, is once again in the spotlight, although her home town of Halifax in West Yorkshire has long championed her achievements as an industrialist and landowner. But in 1834 Anne Lister made a different sort of history when she and another woman took part in the first same-sex marriage ceremony in England at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate in York.  A blue plaque, the designation for a historic building, but the first to have a rainbow border, was installed in the church last year.

Gentleman Jack is a new British-American series created by Sally Wainwright (Last Tango in Halifax, Happy Valley) set to air soon on BBC One (U.K.) and HBO (U.S.), and starring Suranne Jones (Scott & Bailey, Doctor Foster). The series begins in 1832, when Anne returns from adventurous travel abroad, ready to restore her house, Shibden Hall, take on her industrial neighbors, and beat them all at their own game. (You’ll recognize Shibden Hall as the creepy Tudor house where Alan and Celia in Last Tango in Halifax are accidentally locked in overnight.) But Anne needs what any gentleman in a similar situation would also want—a wife. And she finds one a few miles away, heiress Miss Ann Walker, played in the series by Sophie Rundle (Alice in Jamestown, also Happy Valley, Peaky Blinders). It’s not the first British TV effort to tell her story—in 2010, the BBC aired a dramatization of her life, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, and comedian/journalist Sue Perkins, host of the original version of The Great British Baking Show, made a documentary, Revealing Anne Lister.