SYMHC Classics: Anne Lister

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. The second season of the TV show Gentleman Jack has been airing on HBO or on BBC One for folks in the UK. Back when the first season came out in we heard from a lot of people that they first learned about the show's protagonist and lister from our January episode of the podcast. The first season of this show, uh, which again is called Gentleman Jack, it kind of skipped over and listens earlier life, which is a big part of this episode, and those early years really revealed and listener to be a complicated person. I can't really say how season two aligns with the real Analyst though, because even though this Saturday classic is coming out towards the very end of this season, we are recording it when only one episode has come out in the US so far, and I haven't even watched that one yet. Dundon, who knows holp you a surprise. We hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Even if you are not a fan of Regency fiction, you're probably familiar with this whole idea of a woman who is in search of a husband, either because her family doesn't have any money, or because the money they do have is all settled on a male relative, leaving nothing for the families women. It's such a running theme in fiction that's either from or about the whole Regency era that it's easy to start imagining that every upper class woman's life worked that way. So today we're going to talk about a woman whose life defied that whole convention. Her name was Anne Lister, and she was not looking for a husband at all. She was looking for a wife. And Lister was also a prolific diarist. She wrote more than six thousand pages and four million words over her lifetime, and about a sixth of those words were written in code. And these coded sections she wrote about her relationships with other women so frankly and with so much detail that when these coded sections were first decoded, people wondered if they were a hoax. It probably didn't help it. In addition to all of the sexually explicit parts, the lives of Anne and her social and romantic circles are really really full of drama. It's like if Jane Austen met Sarah Waters. So we are not going to get into the details of Anne's sex life, but heads up that if this episode piques your interest and you decide to go read her diaries for yourself, you will learn a lot a lot about it. Also just a heads up that later on this episode we have a brief mention of a rape. And Lister was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, on April third. Her parents were Jeremy Lister and Rebecca Battle. Ann's father had served with the British in the American Revolutionary War, and Anne was one of six children, four boys and two girls. The Listers are part of the Landed gentry, and Jeremy's older brother, James, had inherited the estate of Shibden Hall. He was living there with his and Jeremy's sister, who was also named Anne. There are a lot of Ann's in this story. Shibden Hall had an income from rents on the cottages and the farms that were part of the estate, and this was large enough of an income that the family did not have to work, but not large enough to support a particularly lavish lifestyle. Apart from not having to work, An's immediate family didn't have much money of their own, and three brothers were next in line to inherit Shibden Hall, but Anne herself was not expecting any kind of inheritance. When she left for boarding school in eighteen o four. It was her aunt Anne who was paying her way, and boarding school was the Mannor School in York, and that is where she had her first romantic relationship, which was with another student named Eliza rain And and Eliza shared an attic room at the school that was nicknamed the Slope. The rest of the school's boarding students were housed in a dormitory, and the reason for Anne and Eliza being housed in the attic is not specifically documented, but there are some likely reasons. For Anne. It was probably because of money. The school's other boarding students were generally much wealthier than she was, and it's also possible that the school's staff wanted to keep Anne separate from the other girls because of her behavior. She was stubborn and rebellious and an unladylike tomboy. This whole making her live in the attic thing because she didn't have any money reminds me of a little Princess starring Shirley Temple. Uh, yeah, that one that shows up in various places. It's almost trophy. Yeah. Well, I think that that's part of the reason why people were like, are these diaries reeled? In addition to women definitely wouldn't write about this stuff. There's the kids are living in the attic because they don't have any money. So meanwhile, Eliza was the daughter of an Indian woman and an English doctor who had served with the British East India Company. Her parents had gotten married in India, but their marriage wasn't registered back in Britain, so Eliza and her sister Jane were both considered to be illegitimate. Eliza was wealthy, so the money thing was not why she was in the attic. She was probably housed in the attic due to a combination of racism and concerns about her supposedly out of wedlock birth. Living together in the slope, and and Eliza developed an intense friendship that evolved into a romantic relationship. After about six months, they had exchanged rings and promised to marry one another after they finished school. They also worked out a code that come find mathematical and zodiac symbols with Latin and Greek letters so that they could write each other love letters without being discovered. It was really probably Eliza, who already spoke multiple languages, that created the code itself, and would later use this code to write all the details, I mean really all of them about her relationships with other women in her diary. After Anne and Eliza had been together for about two years, someone intercepted a package that one of them sent to the other, and their relationship was at that point discovered. Anne was immediately asked to leave the school and told that she could only come back after Eliza had left. So Anne went back home to Halifax, where she was tutored by the Reverend Samuel Knight. But this physical separation didn't stop, and an Eliza's relationship, they kept writing each other letters, this time without raising anybody's suspicions. Eliza also came to stay with Anne for every school break, and Ann's first entry and her first diary, which is stated August eleven of eighteen oh six, is from the end of one of these visits that began simply Eliza left us. By the autumn of eighteen o eight, Anne was getting restless. She was seventeen at that point, and she had become a lot more flagrant and public in her stubborn tomboyishness. She had also started giving flute lessons to an unmarried woman named Maria Alexander, and this was a connection that her family did not think was appropriate. Maria was over thirty and her unmarried older brothers were also living at home. Anne was also openly flirtatious with Maria, including in front of Eliza when she took her along on one of these flute lesson visits. In addition to disregarding Eliza's feelings and all of this, and also started more and more wilfully disregarding social expectations about how girls should behave. She asked to go to Portsmouth with the Alexander's without a chaperone, on a trip that would also involve Maria's older, unmarried brothers. She ignored her curfew, and she visited the Alexander's even after her family had forbidden her to do so. When her family finally gave her permission to spend two nights with the Alexander's over New Year's Eve, she stayed there for two weeks, and it wasn't just with the Alexander's that Anne willfully defied what was expected of a young woman. She started a neighborhood scandal after she went with a Captain Burn to his chamber alone on more than one occasion to look at his pistols. AND's behavior had become so notorious that people in the neighborhood started calling her gentleman Jack. So through all of this, And was still having a relationship with Eliza, and her behavior was causing Eliza more and more distress. And this was particularly true after And told Eliza that twenty one was much too young for the two of them to live together and they should wait until they were more like. They were both seventeen at this point, so Anne was basically saying, we'll live together in a decade. Eliza's letters to Anne at this point became increasingly anxious and sorrowful, and by eighteen o nine she was asking for reassurance that the two of them would ever be together at all. In eighteen ten, a tragedy struck the Lister family that changed Anne's life significantly. We're going to discuss that. After we first paused for a little sponsor break in January of eighteen ten, Ann Lister's oldest brother, John died during an influenza outbreak. John had been Anne's closest sibling, and they'd already lost two of their other brothers, So instead of being one of six siblings and was now one of three, with only her brother Samuel and her sister Marian still living. John's death meant that Anne was now second in line to inherit Shibden Hall, rather than third. She started to consider what it would mean if she inherited the estate and what she would need to be able to do to run it herself. To do so in the lifestyle she wanted, she would need more money than Shibden Hall could provide. The solution was to marry well, and for Anne that meant marrying a rich and ideally noble woman. Eliza finished her studies at the Manor School that same year, and she went to live with a cousin in Halifax to wait for the day that she and Anne could start a home together. With Eliza no longer at the school, and went back, It's possible that Anne was still thinking that she could make Eliza her wife. After all, Eliza was an heiress, she really had a lot of money that was going to come to her when she turned twenty one. But not long after all of this, when Anne became second in line to inherit Shibden Hall, Eliza's family experienced its own tragedy. Eliza's sister Jane had gotten married to Lieutenant Henry Bolton and moved back to India with him, but he had abandoned her. Her inheritance had become his when they married, so she had nothing of her own. Arrangements were made for her to come back to Halifax, but she had to travel for months on a ship unaccompanied. She was imprisoned after arriving in France because she couldn't prove her British citizenship. After all of this, she arrived in England pregnant with a child that could not have been her husband's that was almost certainly the result of a rape. So now that she was second in line to inherit Shipden Hall and started to care a lot more about other people's opinions of her. This included the opinions of two of the day students at the Manor School. One was Isabella Northcliffe, who is referred to as tib in Annt's journals. Isabella and Anne had started a relationship, but then Isabella had had introduced Anne to Marianna Belcolm. Of all of the women and was involved with during her lifetime, she was probably the most in love with Marianna. Anne worried about how Eliza's so called fallen sister would affect Marianna and Isabella's opinions of her. Anne kept her engagement to Eliza secret from Marianna and Isabella, and she didn't tell Eliza about her romantic involvement with the two young women back at school, but it was obvious to Eliza that Anne was forming new relationships and that she was excluding her from them. When Anne visited Marianna or Isabella, Eliza was not invited. As Eliza approached her twenty first birthday, which was when she would actually receive her inheritance, she found herself with her own suitor. This was Captain John Alexander, who insisted that this had nothing to do with her money at Whether that's true, uh, not really sure, but Eliza still considered herself to be Anne's wife. She was also increasingly worried, though, that Anne was never going to make good on her promise that they would lived together one day, so she wrote to Anne to get reassurance about this their future together and didn't answer. Instead, Anne, who could be pretty manipulative in her relationships, sent letters to Eliza's guardian, William Duffin, as well as to Captain Alexander, and gave each of them a distorted version of what was going on. The result was that the Captain went to William Duffin to demand to marry Ealiza, but Duffin refused. Even though none of this was any of her own doing, Eliza found herself branded as a temptress and she was ostracized. She was so distraught over everything that she took a trip to Bristol to try to recover. Meanwhile, Anne went on her own trip to Bath with Isabella and Marianna, until it became clear that she just did not have the money or the social connections to keep up with two of them there. So Anne went back home on June nine thirteen as twenty two year old, and was on her way home she learned that her last surviving brother, Samuel, had drowned. Anne was now the one who would inherit Shibden Hall, and it became even more important to her to have a respectable life and reputation. Although her brother had died during military service, he had drowned on a pleasure boat. It was not considered to be a very noble or distinguished death, and Anne thought that she needed to make the family respectable again and to conduct herself in a way that would bring honor to the estate of Shibden Hall. An started cutting ties with Eliza. She didn't invite Eliza to Sam's funeral or answer her repeated requests to return her letters and gifts and engagement ring, and eventually invited Eliza on a trip that she was taking with Isabella, but Eliza got really sick early into the journey and went home again once she was better. Eliza was distraught over An's rejection, and not long after she got home, she had an unexpected visit it from her sister Jane, who by this time was struggling with both alcoholism and tuberculosis and was supporting herself through sex work. Jane also seemed to be emotionally unstable, and when Eliza started to look for a place in London to have her committed, gossip began to spread that she was doing all of this for her own personal gain. Eliza went through cycles of depression and agitation, until Marianna Belcome asked her father, who ran an asylum, to intervene. Eliza was temporarily committed, and from that point she was in and out of asylums until eighteen sixteen, when she was declared insane. Eliza spent the rest of her life in Marianna Belcolm's father's asylum, and she died there in eighteen sixty at the age of sixty eight. She had a will. Originally she had left everything to Anne, but she had rewritten it to leave everything to her former suitor, Captain Alexander, who she eventually seemed to regret not having married. But this new will was ruled invalid and so what was left of her fortune was claimed by the crown. As for Eliza's sister, her son died in eighteen seventeen at the age of six, and in eighteen nineteen her husband was killed in action. Even though he had abandoned her, Jane was still legally his wife, so what was left of her fortune reverted back to her. This was unfortunately not in time to help her. However. James tuberculosis was quite advanced at that time, and she died in November of eighteen nineteen, only a few months after her husband's death. As all of this was happening with Eliza being committed, she obviously lived much longer after that. Anne suffered a rejection of her own. Although she had never stopped having physical relationships with other women, she was still passionately in love with Marianna Belcolm. She had been making plans for the two of them to have a life together, but in March of eighteen sixteen, Marianna's family found a suitor for her. They arranged things so that Anne, who was visiting, would be staying with neighbors instead of at their house, and then they secreted Marianna away to get married to Charles Lawton. Anne was devastated. She made Marianna promise that they would still live together once Charles died, and since he was twenty years older than Marianna was, she hoped that that was going to happen soon. In the meantime, the two women did not stop seeing each other, and Anne even lived with Marianna and Charles for the first six months of their marriage. When Charles realized that Marianna and Anne were physically involved, he banished Anne from the house, but eventually he did allow the two women to see one another again. This didn't work out so well for Anne though. Later on in her life, she contracted a sexually transmitted infection for Marianna and then pass it on to at least one other partner. She eventually went to Paris to try to seek medical treatment for this infection, but there was not really a cure for whatever it was at this point, so she probably carried it for the rest of her life. After all of this drama, Anne's life started to settle down a little. We're going to talk more about that after we have another little sponsor break and Lister never completely forgave herself for betraying Eliza, and she visited her in the asylum from time to time until her death. After her own heartbreak with Marianna, and started to take a more practical approach to finding a wife. She started looking for somebody who would have enough money to support the lifestyle that she wanted, but not necessarily someone who would provoked that same all consuming love that she had had for Marianna. She also became more practical in the rest of her affairs. By eighteen seventeen, she had moved into Shibdon Hall with her aunt Anne and uncle James, and she wanted to prove to them that she was capable of managing the estate herself, even though she was the heir. There were other branches of the Lister family and wanted to rule out any possibility that the estate would wind up settled on them instead. Anne had been keeping her diaries on a messy collection of paper scraps until this point, but she abandoned that in eighteen seventeen and started writing in large bound journals, meticulously dating her entries and recording all of her daily habits. Anne's daily writing included the weather, how she had slept, what she was learning. She was determined to continue her education, and so she got up at five am every day to study, and then she kept records of all of her progress in her diary. She also used these diaries to keep up with what was going on at Shibdon Hall in the surrounding neighborhood. She kept track of all her purchases and her interactions with tenants and workers. She made notes about local gossip and quarrels among the gentry. She also noted what was going on in the rest of the world the same way that Samuel Peep's diary created an important record of life in London and major world events from sixteen sixty to sixteen sixty nine, and Lister's diary really created a record of Halifax in the greater world from eighteen seventeen to eighteen forty. She also became a lot more reserved in her behavior in her habits, while continuing to defy gender expectations. She dressed in black, which wasn't a color that women typically wore unless they were in mourning, but it was a color that men often wore while traveling, and was sort of patterning her wardrobe around the idea of a distinguished conservative gentleman traveler. She didn't wear trousers, though these were black dresses that had a somewhat more masculine air. She also made it a point not to gossip about people anymore. So like that business where she was writing misleading letters to people to try to get away, Like that really cut a lot back. I'm so good, I'm so delighted to hear it. Uh. When she was about twenty six and attracted the attentions of a Mr. Montague, but she did not reciprocate on January nine, eight twenty one, she wrote in her diary that she had burned all of his farewell verses so that quote no trace of any man's admiration may remain. She went on to say, quote, I love and only love the fairer sex, and thus beloved by them. In turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs. In July of eighteen twenty two, and and her aunt took a tour of North Wales and they visited past podcast subjects Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby the Ladies of Lonothlind. On the twenty three she met Sarah Ponsonby at plas Knewid, which was their home. Eleanor was ill that day and was asleep during aunt's visit. She exchanged some letters with the Ladies of Longothlind later on after she returned home. In January of eighteen twenty six, as uncle James died, and An inherited Shibden Hall under the condition that her aunt, Anne and her father could still live on the property and collect portions of their rent. And Anne continued to manage the domestic world of the household. While Anne was responsible for the day to day matters of managing the estate, which she did with the help of a steward for the agricultural work and an agent for the industrial work. She also got to work trying to improve the estate. She had two goals in mind, to provide the family with an ongoing comfortable income and to situate the estate so that it would be worth more when it was passed on to another air. Her extensive self education over the past decade or so really paid off in this. She had developed a working knowledge of science, engineering, and business, as well as the industries that were growing up in the area, including cold timber and stone. She also began traveling extensively all over Europe as she continued to look for a suitable wife. She had no trouble finding love interests. When she met someone she thought might return her interest, she would bring up a book or a play that had subtle or overt themes of love between women and see how the other woman responded. And this led to a lot of flings, but not really to any long term attachment. It was back home in Halifax that Anne Lester finally found a woman to spend the rest of her life with, and that woman was Ann Walker. An heiress who lived on a nearby estate. Her method of finding potential love interests is like the modern equivalent would be walking up to somebody and and asking them whether they like Teaket and Sarah like this is sort of the regency equivalent of gator conversation. In eighteen thirty two, and Lester had started working with an architect named John Harper to try to improve Shipton Hall's architecture and its grounds. She was a really avid walker, so she had added a wilderness garden complete with waterfalls and a small chamiere which is a thatch roof hut, and this hut became her retreat while she can while she courted and Walker. And Walker, for her part, is wary of an Lister, and Lister made no secret of the fact that she was interested in and Walker's money, and ann Walker knew and Lister was not in love with her. But by eighteen thirty four both of the ants were living at Shibden Hall, and on Easter Sunday of that year they exchanged rings with one another and then took communion together at Holy Trinity Church in good ram Gate in York. They lived from that point on as a married couple, including renting a pew together in the front row of their parish church, and Walker's money funded a lot of the work that Anne Lister was planning at Shibden Hall over the next few years. Improvements included a Norman tower to house the library, a grand staircase in the entryway, and a set of tunnels so that the household staff could get from place to place without being seen. And Lister also decided to try her hand at managing a coal mining operation rather than leasing the rights to someone else and earning money that way, and Walker's money fund at the sinking of two coal pits on Shipden Hall's property. The two ants also continued traveling as much as their time and Anne Walker's money allowed, and Lister was really the one driving these trips. She had way more wander less than Anne Walker did. These weren't laid back pleasure trips either. Their travels were daring and unconventional, and Lister was an avid mountaineer and she summitted multiple peaks in the Pyrenees. They took horseback journeys into territory that was really more often home to military units than two unescorted ladies. In eighteen thirty six, and Lister's father died. She was at that point a d in control of shib In Hall. I think this means that her aunt Anne had also died, but I could not find confirmation of when that happened. In eighteen thirty seven, the two hands wrote out wills to each other, and each of them left the other one all of her possessions and wealth on the condition that the surviving and never married. In eight thirty nine, they left on a two year trip through Scandinavia, the Low Countries and Russia. The following year, and Lister contracted some kind of fever while touring the Caucusus. In her last diary entry, dated August eighteen forty, she doesn't mention anything odd about her health, but on September twenty she died at the age of forty nine. She had apparently requested to be buried at home in Halifax, so Anne Walker had her body embalmed and accompanied it on a six month journey home, and Lister was finally buried at Halifax Parish Church. Their relationship had not always been particularly happy, right I just I imagine an Walker just kind of gritting her teeth through some of this travel when she really wanted to be at home with their nice garden in the waterfall in the library at Shipton Hall. But and Lister's death and this long journey home with her body really took a toll on an walk his health. In eighteen forty two, her sister and a doctor conspired to have her declared insane and committed to an asylum so that they could take over her fortune, including Shipton Hall. This was temporary in terms of the ownership of Shipton Hall. When Anne Walker died in eighteen fifty four, the estate reverted back to the Lister family. Ann Lister's diaries stayed in the family library until the late nineteenth century. John Lister's parents had inherited the estate when he was eight, and he had been publishing transcriptions of the plain language portions of Anne's diaries in the Halifax Guardian. With the help of Arthur Barrell, he cracked the code and discovered what Anne had been writing about all that time. Ton Lister was horrified. I mean, I can't stress that they are really explicit. Uh. And apart from there being really explicit, homosexuality between men was illegal in Britain at the time, and although homosexuality between women wasn't specifically outlawed, it was highly stigmatized. So John Lister thought about burning these diaries when he realized what was in them. Ultimately, I think fortunately he locked them away again. It's been speculated that John Lister also had relationships with other men, and that this desire to keep the diaries hidden was partly by motivated by self preservation and basically being afraid of outing himself. Until the mid twentieth century, most of the archivists and historians who examined Anne Lister's diaries stayed away from their explicit content in their published work. Dr Phyllis Ramsden worked with the journals in the nineteen sixties and wound up mostly establishing a chronology and focusing on Anne's travels. A graduate student named Vivian Ingham was part of this work as well, and was working on a PhD dissertation, but she died before that work was complete. By the nineteen eighties, at least some of the stigma surrounding lesbian relationships was starting to fade, and in historian Helena Whitbread published I Know My Own Heart The Diaries of En Lister eighteen forty. This volume included both decoded and transcribed material from the diaries. She published a second collection in so these two volumes obviously do not cover the entire diary that is thousands and thousands of pages, but they did make some of the decoded material widely available for the first time, and really parts of the rest of it as well. Even when she was not writing in code. An Lister's handwriting is really hard to read. There are a lot of scans of pages from the diary on the internet. It is very difficult. And on top of the very difficult to read parts, she used a lot of a lot a lot of made up abbreviations, so it could be hard even when you could read what she was saying to figure out exactly what she was talking about. The thing too, to consider, right when you're looking at someone's diaries and we've established that she really notated everything, is that a lot of it is probably very boring. Weather and Ye had like transaction talk, so that would be why probably most people would not want to read a list of the temperatures in Halifax. Of course, so several years uh an Lister's diaries are one of the longest in the English language, and they demonstrate how she really was ahead of her time. She successfully managed and improved on Shibden Hall at a time when it was not common at all for a woman to be the head of a household. In this way, she held her own and the overwhelmingly male dominated and cut throat coal industry, she found a way to live with a lot more independence and autonomy than many women, even other wealthy white women, were able to do it this time. The diaries also show how she was ahead of her time in terms of her relationships with other women, to the point that she's sometimes described as the first modern lesbian. There have obviously been same sex relationships throughout recorded history, but the idea of a lesbian identity, or the more general idea that having relationships with someone of the same sex is intrinsically connected to who you are as a person, is way more recent in the Western world. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word lesbianism was first used in writing to describe homosexual attraction between women in eighteen seventy, with lesbian first used in the same way twenty years later, and using the word lesbian to describe a person instead of an attraction or a sex act is even later than that that's first used in writing in and that same thing is true for most of the synonyms. So sapphis um meaning homosexual relations between women dates back to eighteen ninety, but sapphist didn't arrive until the nineteen twenties, and even then it indicated a dysfunction more than an identity. All of this was decade after Anne Lister's death in eighteen forty, even though she was living before language really existed to describe herself, and Lister did seem to have a sense that her attraction to other women was an intransic part of herself. Her diaries document a lot of self reflection and introspection about why she was attracted to women and what that meant about her, and is also completely accepting of who she is and these diaries, although she does document some incidents of being harassed for what she was wearing or how she lived her life, this is really different from a lot of other early lesbian literature, like if you read The Well of Loneliness, which is generally marked as the first lesbian novel in English, it is tragic and sad and full of just a lot of self doubt and shame, and there's none of that and Ann Lister's life, uh, probably because she lived before lesbian was really an identity, because like the coalescence of that identity was happening at the same time time as a lot of criminalization was happening in stigma, and when those two things like came about in parallel with each other, that meant you can see it's affect on people's um like sense of themselves and mental health and all of that. In early lesbian literature. This sets Anne and her diaries apart from some of the other women that we've talked about on the show who definitely had long term and loving relationships with other women, but lived before the idea of a lesbian identity really existed in Western culture. So examples would be the aforementioned Ladies of Lang Lacham and Jane Adams. Yet Jane adams life overlapped the evolution of lesbian identity, but this isn't something that she wrote about in any of her surviving journals or papers or anything, so we know a lot less about how she conceived of herself. It's easy to assume what she would have thought about herself, but we also have other examples of people we do you know about who lived at a time when an identity was evolving and we're like, I don't feel like that word applies to me, Like we saw that with Sylvia Rivera and the word transgender. She was like, I'm not sure that's me. I have another person on my short list for a future episode maybe who was a vaudeville female impersonator that similarly lived at a time when gay became a like more coalesced into an identity for men, and was similarly like, I don't think that's me, even though he exclusively had relationships other men for his whole life. So anyway, because of all this Inleven, the United Kingdom formally recognized the historical and cultural value of Anlister's diaries and they were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Their entry on the UK Memory of the World Register page reads, in part quote, the diaries include a wealth of information about politics, business, estate management, religion, education and reading, science, medicine, travel, and local and national events. As this important area of Yorkshire experienced the rapid effects of the Industrial Revolution. Seen from the viewpoint of an extremely well educated and pioneering. Should probably say woman here, but there seems to be a word missing. It is her comprehensive and painfully honest account of lesbian life and reflections on her nature, however, which have made these diaries unique. They have shaped and continued to shape the direction of UK gender studies and women's history. Her story reminds me a lot of the same exact kinds of um squabbles and pettyback biting that I lived through in middle school, but with much higher stakes we were We were not having people confined two asylums in middle school, when we were sending snipy back bitey mean girl letters to each other. Yeah, I think where I I have a moment where I turn on analystic is the letter or where she kind of contrives some some poor things to happen to Eliza by sort of betraying her and making stuff up. Yeah she yeah, Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works, email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at Missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H m hm