Fed up of graphic HBO dramas with too much sex and nudity? If so, the US network's forthcoming BBC collaboration Gentleman Jack may not be be for you. Written by Happy Valley screenwriter Sally Wainwright, the newly trailered series will be based on the diaries of the real 19th-century noblewoman and landowner Anne Lister, played by Suranne Jones, who was sometimes dubbed “Britain's first modern lesbian”.

Even by today's standards, the diaries – which Lister partly wrote in a self-invented secret code – are detailed and carefully explicit, with references to orgasms and sexually transmitted diseases (and the “consequent discharge”), as well as to its author’s passionate, heart-wrenching desire for the touch of another female body.

Less salaciously and more importantly, however, they are testament to a life lived outside the norm, and to a woman who was unafraid to embrace her lesbianism years before her lifestyle and her romantic choices would be accepted by mainstream society.

The Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit author Jeanette Winterson noted that when the diaries were finally rediscovered, decoded and published by historian Helena Whitbread, it was at a time of increased prejudice towards LGBTQ people.

“It is ironic that Anne Lister should re-surface after a 150 years in 1988, when the Thatcher government passed the infamous Section 28, banning public bodies from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, or, in that hideous phrase, ‘pretended family relationships’,” Winterson wrote in 2010, after Lister’s story was turned into the one-off BBC drama The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (with Maxine Peake in the title role).