In 2002 the BBC premiered a three-part adaptation of Sarah Waterss novel Tipping the Velvet the rare show that managed to transcend the feverish tabloid-stoked anticipation of its transgressive elements. Billed as the most explicit lesbian drama in British television history Tipping the Velvet told the story of a Whitstable oyster girl Nan Rachael Stirling who falls in love with a male impersonator Kitty Keeley Hawes and ends up embroiled in a Victorian subculture of sapphism and exploitation. Compared with how abjectly the miniseries was hyped Scenes in the drama involve crude sex toys swearing and sex acts the Daily Mail gasped what actually aired was a playful poignant coming-of-age story about sexuality hiding in plain sight. Tipping Waters wrote in 2018 was itself exploited for the purposes of titillation and yet the fact that it was adapted at all was close to miraculous given the dearth of lesbian stories in mainstream culture.
A lot has changed since 2002 which is maybe why HBOs new eight-part drama Gentleman Jack co-produced with the BBC feels like such an oddity. Unlike Tipping the Velvet which was fiction—an effort to forge space for queerness in a time and a literary landscape where it almost never exposed itself—Gentleman Jack is based on the diaries of a real woman a landowner and an industrialist named Anne Lister who had whats often interpreted as Britains first lesbian marriage. Born in 1791 in the north of England Lister dressed in masculine clothing and chronicled her romantic and sexual relationships with women in her diaries the most scandalous entries of which were written in a code of her own invention. In 1834 she participated in a commitment ceremony with Ann Walker another woman of independent wealth and the two lived and traveled together until Listers death.
Lister is an extraordinary character—a woman who found ways to thwart every restriction that society imposed upon her. Forbidden to attend university she pursued independent medical study with a surgeon in Paris. Banned from loving freely she conducted romantic relationships with women as brazenly as she dared although the coded nature of her diary conveys her awareness of the stakes of discovery. Those stakes though are largely absent from Gentleman Jack an arch jaunty series in which Lister only seems to win. Played with entrancing charisma and poise by Suranne Jones Lister is a strange kind of anachronism a wry 19th-century boss with breezy fearlessness and Fleabag-esque asides to the camera. Im always all right she tells a character in one scene and the odd thing is that she is—barring some minor pangs of heartbreak and one violent altercation Joness Lister is unsinkable in both spirits and status.
In theory Listers indomitability makes her the perfect candidate for dramatization. In practice though somethings missing. How can a character be bold and transgressive when so few obstacles seem to be in the way of her desires? Gentleman Jack is adapted by Sally Wainwright the superb British screenwriter behind Happy Valley and To Walk Invisible a two-hour drama about the lives of the Brontë sisters. What tends to tie her work together is a setting the northern English county of Yorkshire and a commitment to writing strong nonconformist female characters. With Listers diaries which were decoded and published starting in 1988 Wainwright has intimate access to Listers mind. And yet something gets lost in translation. As written in Gentleman Jack Lister is a modern HBO heroine transposed into a conventional costume drama ambitious and dynamic and protected by privilege.
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