{"id":1608,"date":"2024-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-31T21:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1608"},"modified":"2025-01-01T10:21:11","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T21:21:11","slug":"learned-by-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2024\/01\/01\/learned-by-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Learned by Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Emma Donoghue<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Pan MacMillan<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, January 1st 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In addition to being an award-winning author and playwright, Emma Donoghue is a scholar of lesbian history and literature. A chance encounter with the work of 19th<\/sup> Century diarist Anne Lister, often described as the \u2018first modern lesbian,\u2019 kickstarted both her academic and literary career, and she describes Learned by Heart<\/em>, which reimagines Lister\u2019s first romantic relationship, as a project two and a half decades in the making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lister, who has been the subject of considerable scholarship since the late 80s, will be familiar to anybody who has watched Sally Wainwright\u2019s wonderful dramatisation Gentleman Jack<\/em>. Much less is known about Eliza Raine, the biracial heiress whom Lister met and fell in love with in 1805 when they were students at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. Although Lister left the school the following year, she and Raine continued their passionate relationship and planned to \u201cgo off together\u201d when they came of age. But Lister\u2019s serial infidelities eventually led Raine to realise this dream would never eventuate, precipitating an emotional collapse that destroyed her life. At the age of 23, she became a patient at Clifton House, the first of a series of asylums in which she spent the remaining forty-six years of her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learned by Heart<\/em> tells the story of the relationship through Eliza\u2019s eyes, alternating between a close third-person portrayal of their year together at the Manor School and a series of letters from Reine to Lister in 1815, shortly after entering Clifton House. It draws heavily on primary and secondary sources, including unpublished material to, from, and about Raine, to create a vivid and realistic portrait not just of Eliza but also of the school and, by extension, the broader social and cultural context within which the young lovers were immersed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lister is eccentric, rebellious, and brilliant, taking \u201ca particular satisfaction in being peculiar\u2026[breaking] rules every day but [getting] away with it, whether by evasion or scrutiny, barefaced denial, or lawyerly quibbles.\u201d<\/em> Eliza, meanwhile, is acutely aware of her precarious social position as the child of a \u2018country marriage\u2019 (the euphemistic term for the unofficial union between Englishmen stationed in India and local women) and that she will always be viewed as inferior: one of the Empire\u2019s \u2018less fortunate\u2019 brethren. But through Lister\u2019s eyes she can see herself as beautiful, and between them, as she writes in one of her letters, \u201cwe invented love\u2026we were a pair of originals, as long as we were a pair. Perhaps the difference is you embraced your singularity and I cringed at mine.\u201d<\/em>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to the work of Wainwright and others, Lister has been the subject of significant academic and public interest. In Learned by Heart,<\/em> Donoghue hopes to draw similar attention to a woman she sees as appallingly neglected in comparison to her famous lover. Between her intimate and detailed reimagining of this brief but critical period in Eliza\u2019s life and the historical context provided in the author\u2019s notes, I think she has succeeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.odt.co.nz\/entertainment\/books\/learned-heart<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emma Donoghue Pan MacMillan Otago Daily Times, January 1st 2024 In addition to being an award-winning author and playwright, Emma Donoghue is a scholar of lesbian history and literature. A chance encounter with the work of 19th Century diarist Anne Lister, often described as the \u2018first modern lesbian,\u2019 kickstarted both her academic and literary career, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[448,199,370,421,18],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-448","tag-emma-donoghue","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}