She talks like one, too, whether collecting rent from tenants on her British estate or seducing the ladies.

“Nature played a challenging trick on me, didn’t she, putting a bold spirit like mine in this vessel, in which I’m obliged to wear frills and petticoats?,” Lister, broadly considered to be the first modern lesbian, confides. “Well, I refuse to be cowed by it.”

In “Gentleman Jack,” the new HBO-BBC historical drama from Sally Wainwright (“Happy Valley”), Lister (Suranne Jones) cuts a wide swath through 1832 Halifax, West Yorkshire, where she’s determined to rejuvenate her shabby ancestral home, Shibden Hall, reopen its coal mines and marry well; her eye is on the neighboring heiress, Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle).

The series, debuting on Monday, April 22, on HBO and its platforms, is inspired by Lister’s diaries, comprising some four million words — with the most intimate details of her romantic liaisons written in a secret code based on algebraic symbols and Ancient Greek, and deciphered in the 1930s. KATHRYN SHATTUCK