If you watched Gentleman Jack, the BBC and HBO series with Suranne Jones striding across the Yorkshire moors in a top hat, you met Anne Lister as a confident woman in her forties. She was a landowner and diarist who had already loved and lost several women by the time the show begins.
Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart goes back to where it started.
The year is 1805. Anne Lister is fourteen, a clever, rebellious tomboy sent to the Manor School for young ladies in York. There she meets Eliza Raine, an orphaned heiress who was sent to England from India as a child and doesn’t quite fit anywhere. The two girls fall in love in secret, and the novel follows what happens to them.
The story is true, or as close to true as historical fiction gets. Lister kept an enormous diary throughout her life, millions of words, with the most intimate parts written in a code of her own invention. When it was finally decoded, it turned out to be one of the most detailed records of a woman’s love for women ever written. Donoghue drew on those journals and years of research to rebuild the story of Anne’s first love.
Eliza is the real discovery here. In Gentleman Jack and in most accounts of Lister’s life, she’s a footnote. Learned by Heart makes her a full character, and anyone who knows her history will understand why that matters. The subject headings on the /books entry mention mental illness, and that’s a hint of where her story goes. The Washington Post called the book “a wrenching love story,” and that’s a fair warning.
Donoghue is ideally suited to this. She has written about lesbian history for decades, in fiction and non-fiction, and she’s known for doing her homework. The research shows in the details of the boarding school, the girls’ lessons and the rules they had to work around. But it never feels like a history lesson. The book is above all about two teenagers who find each other in a world with no words for what they feel.
The novel came out in 2023 from Little, Brown, and the bibliography rates it Good. It’s a natural companion to Gentleman Jack, and a satisfying one if you’ve finished the series and still want more Lister.
This is for Gentleman Jack fans, readers of historical lesbian fiction, and anyone who loves a first-love story, even one they know won’t end well. It’s also for readers who enjoy boarding school novels and want one with real emotional stakes.
For more Donoghue, Room is also in the bibliography, a very different book from the same writer.
Over to you. Did you watch Gentleman Jack, and did you know about Eliza Raine before this? Can historical fiction ever be fair to people who left their own diaries? And who was your first schoolgirl crush?
Full details are on the Learned by Heart entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.