One morning last summer, in the grounds of the West Yorkshire manor house Shibden Hall, Sally Wainwright, the writer and director behind many of the most popular and acclaimed British dramas of the past decade, was standing in a barn, wrapping up a scene among bales of hay. Word came that she was needed outside to discuss an issue regarding a horse. There was some debate as to whether the horse, Percy, should be harnessed to a carriage, which might, his handler warned, cause him to “freak out”.

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It was the first month of filming on Wainwright’s new TV series, Gentleman Jack, which tells the story of the former occupant of Shibden Hall, Anne Lister, a 19th-century adventurer, landowner and industrialist, who is sometimes described as the “first modern lesbian” because of the freedom with which she pursued her love affairs with women.

Four months earlier, when I met Wainwright at her home in Oxfordshire, Gentleman Jack had just been a pile of pages in a box on the floor. Now, the show, which Wainwright had dreamed of making for two decades, was finally taking form. Shibden Hall’s grounds were dotted with makeshift neon signs and busy people with walkie talkies. Squawking chickens wove around the feet of the crew and actors, while two Irish wolfhounds lazed in the June sunshine.

Breaking off from horse-related concerns, Wainwright came over to greet me. “I didn’t recognise you,” she said brusquely, her Halifax accent not at all softened by decades of living in the south of England. With her short red hair, navy fleece and walking shoes showing a flash of pink spotty socks poking through, Wainwright looked as if she had strayed off one of the local hiking trails.

There is a certain kind of director – usually male, often obnoxious – who commands a film set through being loud and extrovert, who would certainly have pretended to remember me. Wainwright’s approach was different: she observed with precision and made her points quietly, removing her glasses whenever someone asked her a question. She gave a brief history lesson on the yellow-and-black carriage that might upset Percy; it was a replica of a Lister family heirloom dating back to before the 1750s. For practical reasons, horse and carriage remained uncoupled.

After decades in TV, at the age of 56, Wainwright has finally reached the point where her name carries such heft that she can make whatever she wants to make. Her two most celebrated shows, Last Tango in Halifax, about a love affair between a couple in their 70s, and the rural thriller Happy Valley, marked high points in recent British TV, winning awards by the armful, pulling in millions of viewers in the UK and gathering a considerable international audience. Her fans include the Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro and Lena Dunham, who have both tweeted their admiration of her work.

Gentleman Jack is Wainwright’s most ambitious project to date. In November 2016, she went to the US for a series of meetings, hoping to find partners to help fund the project. It didn’t take much for HBO to come on board. “Everybody had seen Happy Valley and I think most had seen Last Tango, so it definitely helped,” she said. It is hard to imagine anyone else getting the green light for a period drama about a lesbian industrialist in Halifax in 1832, where much of the action involves day-to-day business of the local coalmines. HBO made the series in collaboration with the BBC. “Big bananas, with nobs on,” said Wainwright, of the deal.

Despite the period setting, Gentleman Jack pulls together most of the component parts that make a Wainwright drama sing. It is about a no-nonsense woman who is more extraordinary than the world around her wants her to be. It places women and gay characers front and centre. It is about working people and the north of England. It starts, as her shows so often do, when a character has already lived a life; Wainwright’s heroines are often grandmothers. Lister is 40 when we meet her, worn down by a series of failed love affairs with women who have gone on to marry men. Fans of Wainwright’s work, from the police drama Scott & Bailey to the twisting thriller Unforgiven, will find its tenor instantly recognisable, even with the bodices.

Wainwright finds it hard to believe that someone as extraordinary as Lister is still an obscure historical figure. “She should be a household name,” she said. After Lister’s death in 1840, she left behind diaries, some of it written in code, amounting to at least 4m words, which detailed her romantic affairs with women. What emerges is a portrait of “one of the most unorthodox women of the early 19th century”, in the words of the academic Dinah Birch – “an active and entirely unashamed lesbian, a scholar, a dauntless traveller and a resourceful businesswoman,” who also happened to be “not at all nice”. The novelist Emma Donaghue once described Lister as having “the sexual ethics of a bonobo, lying to every lover as a matter of policy”. Wainwright has her own way of summing up Lister’s serial seductions: “She’s a shag-bandit rubber-knickers,” she told me, delightedly. (“Rubber, because they bounce,” she explained, gesturing up and down.)

When filming broke for lunch, I sat with Wainwright on the top deck of the catering bus. A runner put a plate down in front of her. “They bring me food. It’s a bit ridiculous,” she said, embarrassed at the fuss. Wainwright grew up down the road from Shibden Hall, in the market town of Sowerby Bridge, and as a child she visited the manor with her family at weekends. She did not then know who Lister was, but the building had, she told me later, “an extraordinary pull on me, in a way I can’t explain. I have an odd connection to the house.” Now, 50 years later, she was back in the same place, watching scores of people moving around the courtyard and waiting for her instructions: the actors escaping both the climate and the 1830s in puffa jackets and Ugg boots (even in June, Yorkshire was not balmy).

“It’s ace, isn’t it?” she said, happily.

It has been a long journey from Wainwright’s early days, writing trial scripts for soap operas and hoping that they might lead to regular work, to today, making trips to the US and holding meetings with TV network executives to drum up international “big banana” support for her next big project. She started writing professionally in the late 1980s, but has only recently felt as if she is at the peak of her powers. “I’ve only got into that feeling that I can do no wrong for the last two or three years,” she told me during that first visit in Oxfordshire at the beginning of 2018.

It wasn’t until relatively recently that Wainwright began directing. She puts this down, in part, to the difficulty of balancing that kind of all-consuming work with bringing up kids – but also a lack of confidence. More than one actor with whom I spoke remarked upon Wainwright’s shyness, and what seemed to them like a certain lack of self-belief, as if she didn’t know quite how good she was. “The detail you get on the page is one thing, but when she’s actually with you, she’ll tell you so much history for every single beat of her writing. And yet she’ll tell you she’s not smart,” said Suranne Jones, the star of Gentleman Jack and Scott & Bailey. A couple of years ago, Anne Reid, one of the stars of Last Tango, told me: “I just want to chain her to a chair and say, please will you write some more? I think she hit something gold there, and I don’t think she realises it.”

“No, I do,” replied Wainwright, smiling, when I told her what Reid had said. “But you don’t want to look, er … ” She seemed self-conscious about how it might sound to be confident in her own abilities. We were sitting in her study, where framed posters of her series decorate the walls. An electric piano, which she said she played badly, faced out on to the garden. Her writing desk faced the wall.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sophie Rundle as Ann Walker and Suranne Jones as Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack. Photograph: Jay Brooks/BBC/Lookout Point

She thought, and tried again. “I’ve always had a real confidence in my writing. It’s just in other areas that I don’t have confidence, and I think that’s what she might have meant. But I’ve never not felt really cocky about how good I am at writing.”

She has good reason to feel this way. “Happy Valley is one of the great works of 21st-century television,” says David Liddiment, who met Wainwright in the 1990s, and was in charge of ITV when her first series was greenlit. Happy Valley follows the story of Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant played with grim humour by Sarah Lancashire, whose life becomes consumed by the pursuit of the man she believes is responsible for her daughter’s death.

Wainwright’s stories are filled with everyday heroism. Even when Catherine Cawood saves lives, she does so prosaically, rolling up her sleeves and getting on with the job. “One of the reasons I like writing for women is that women have to be heroic, because they’re second-class citizens to a lot of men,” Wainwright said. “Similarly, gay people are put in that role, so there’s an inherent heroic quality.”

I asked her why it had taken so long for her to get to the powerful position she is in now, considering she had been a professional writer for so many years. “I’m a woman,” she said, with a shrug. In 2018, a study by the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain found that only 14% of primetime British television, excluding soaps, had been written by women. And a recent Directors UK survey revealed that the percentage of British television shows directed by a woman dropped between 2013 and 2016, from 27% to 24%. The survey noted that while there was a lot of talk about equality, there was not much actual equality. “I often worry that I’m not getting paid as much as men in my state,” Wainwright told me. “I said to my agent the other day: am I getting paid the same amount as all the other people who’ve won three Baftas for writing? Which was a bit of a dig, because I think I’m the only person who has won three Baftas for writing.”

In 2017, the long-running arts programme The South Bank Show, which confers status on the key cultural figures it profiles, from artists to dancers to musicians, dedicated an episode to her work. “I think they should have made a South Bank Show about me about 15 years ago,” she said. “Considering how prolific I am, how consistent the quality of what I write is.” She paused, again aware of how it sounded.

“That’s the trouble with being a woman. If you do say something like that, you sound like you’ve got a chip on your shoulder and you’re being angry. Rather than just saying it like it is,” she said. “But I think I have got a chip on my shoulder about being fat and northern. A fat northern chip. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Wainwright divides her time between Oxfordshire, where her husband works and her children grew up, and Ripponden, a village not far from Halifax, where she likes to write. “The older I get, when I go to Yorkshire, the more I feel like it’s home,” she said. “When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get away. I wanted to go and live in London because that’s where I thought everything happened. It was only when I discovered Anne Lister that I suddenly realised how glorious Halifax is.”

As a child, Wainwright struggled to read at any length and now suspects she might have been dyslexic. Her father was a headmaster and later a senior lecturer in education, her mother was a school secretary and then a housewife, and her sister, Diane, was a voracious reader who devoured long novels. Wainwright felt as if she couldn’t keep up, so she started to invent her own tales. “I loved the idea of words and language and stories, but I couldn’t [read] with any pleasure,” she said.

Even so, she ended up studying English literature at the University of York. “I knew I wanted to be a dramatist and I knew that was what I was excited about, so I just pushed myself to do the harder stuff,” she said. In her final year, she asked if she could write a play instead of a regular dissertation. Nobody had done that before, so she was told the university would have to judge it on its academic merit once they had read it. “I could have written a load of shit,” she conceded. It got her a first.

The play, Hanging On, had been inspired by a fellow student at York who had received corporate sponsorship to fund his studies, only to drop out and become a hippy, rejecting the values that had supported him. Wainwright turned the character into a woman, and ended up directing the play for a short run at the Edinburgh festival that summer. “It got a really shit review in the Scotsman,” she recalled, but it won the attention of an agent, Meg Davis, who suggested Wainwright move to London while she put her name out there as a scriptwriter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wainwright with Sarah Lancashire on the set of Happy Valley. Photograph: Ben Blackall/BBC

Arriving in London, Wainwright had enough money to last two weeks. She moved into a shared house in Hounslow, where she would meet her future husband. She applied to the civil service and passed the entrance exam. But she had also applied to be a bus driver – and the buses suited her more. “I thought it would leave my brain free, whereas if I had a desk job, my brain would be exhausted at the end of the day,” she told me. She liked driving the old 202 route, which ran between Hounslow and Richmond, because it went underneath the cargo tunnel at Heathrow Airport. But she quickly realised that the buses had their own demands. “Driving the buses was really good fun,” she said. “The passengers weren’t always good fun.”

In her spare time, she wrote. When Wainwright was 24, she was offered the chance to write trial scripts for the radio serial The Archers. She gave up bus-driving immediately. The trial scripts turned into real scripts, and she worked on The Archers for some time, before being poached, in 1991, to write for another rural soap, but this time on television: Emmerdale. “I didn’t like Emmerdale. I thought it was shit – and it was shit at the time – but it was telly, so it was exciting,” Wainwright said. “And it was awful. All the writers lived in fear of being sacked.”

She was there for just a few months. “I got asked to do this newspaper interview where you had to talk about somebody who did your job who you really admired.” She looked mischievous, remembering what happened next. “So I talked about John Stevenson, who wrote Coronation Street.” Britain’s longest-running soap, about a northern, working-class street, is famous for its brassy women in particular. “I said how wonderful Corrie was, because you could hear the writers’ voices coming through, and Emmerdale was shit, because the script editors rewrote everything.” Shortly afterwards she was sacked. “It was not pleasant. It’s the only time I’ve ever been sacked from anything. But even then part of me knew it was hilarious, because it was such a shit job and I got to go back to The Archers.”

In 1992, after Wainwright had torched her TV career on Emmerdale and was back writing for The Archers, the writer and producer Kay Mellor happened to pull one of Wainwright’s scripts out of a pile of submissions sent to her by agents. Mellor, who made her name with Band of Gold, a pioneering crime drama about sex workers in Bradford, was then working at the regional television company Granada, which specialised in finding new northern voices. Mellor was there at the same time as two other soon-to-be television giants: Paul Abbott, who went on to create Clocking Off, State of Play and Shameless, and Russell T Davies, who created Queer as Folk and revived Doctor Who. They were developing new ideas, for which they would need writers.

Mellor immediately brought Wainwright to Granada to write shadow scripts for existing series – a process they used for writers they liked but felt were not quite ready. “She was talented and raw,” Mellor told me. “She didn’t care, you know? She would write what she wanted. That’s what I loved: that kind of boldness and funny, together. It reminded me of how I was and how I wanted to be.” In person, though, Wainwright was cripplingly shy – “extremely quiet and introverted,” recalled Mellor. Liddiment, who first met Wainwright when he was head of entertainment at Granada, remembered her in the same way: “She didn’t say a word, as was her wont at the time,” he said. “She barely spoke. But of course she watches, and she absorbs, and she reads. We commissioned scripts from her and they were fresh and the characters shone through. It was thrilling.”

By 1994, after working on a few smaller shows, Wainwright had moved up through Granada into a full-time writing job on Coronation Street. “I didn’t speak for the first three years,” Wainwright told me. “It was hard, and it was a very male atmosphere. It was by far the best soap, and had been for a long time. It had this legendary status. I just couldn’t believe I was there.”

For an introvert such as Wainwright, it was an exciting and terrifying place to be. “At lunchtime they’d bring in wine and everybody got pissed. And then the afternoon was a bloodbath. There were some really vicious arguments. I didn’t get involved. It was a great group of people, but there were a couple of men there who, looking back, were absolute cunts. Just sexist and racist and nasty and unpleasant. We know this now, but at the time, you didn’t even think about it. That was just what the world was like.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicola Walker, Anne Reid, Derek Jacobi and Sarah Lancashire in Last Tango in Halifax. Photograph: BBC/Red Productions

“It was quite a daunting experience,” agreed Mellor, who also cut her teeth on the soap. “The men would shout over the top of you, shout you down. I said to Sally: ‘You’ve got to talk up. You’ve got to speak.’ But I’m not sure that that was her moment.”

When Wainwright tried to introduce a lesbian character to Coronation Street, her proposal was shot down. “This bloke goes: ‘Oh, we don’t want any of that. Oh, we’re not going to have any of that, are we?’” Wainwright recalled, affecting a voice of whiny disgust. She lived in constant fear that she would be sacked, as she was from Emmerdale, only this time for saying too little, rather than saying too much. “But I never got sacked. Eventually I realised it was because my scripts were good. I always took such pride in it.”

Later, when Wainwright did begin to speak, she made her lasting contribution to the soap by inventing a new family, the Battersbys, who upset the residents by bringing down the tone whenever they could. “I felt the Street was getting too sanitised,” Wainwright said. “It was the time of yuppies, so they put some yuppies in. And then they built the other side of the street and it just looked like Switzerland, all these white gables.”

During the period Wainwright was writing for the soap, Sarah Lancashire – the future star of Last Tango and Happy Valley – was playing Raquel Watts (nee Wolstenhulme), one of the Street’s great barmaids; a ditsy, dolled-up glamourpuss with heart as big as her famous nest of blonde hair. Wainwright had strong feelings about Lancashire’s character, and what fitted. “There was a scene where Raquel went jogging,” said Wainwright, agog. “As if Raquel would go jogging! I thought it was all getting a bit middle-class.” Wainwright saw her mission as bringing the show back down to earth, back to “being about the working-class people who really would live in a street like that”.

The writers were rarely involved in watching their episodes being made, simply because of the time constraints involved in churning out serial television. But Wainwright was already interested in production. “I remember going to the block where they filmed and I didn’t know anyone. Ken Barlow was coming towards me. I thought I’d better try and be sociable, because I’m not, I’m shy, and I didn’t want to just be skulking around, with nobody knowing who the fuck I was. So I said: ‘Hi, I’m Sally, I’m one of the writers, I just wanted to have a look.’” She pulled a face. “He couldn’t give a toss.”

A few minutes later, though, she met Sarah Lancashire. “Sarah was dressed as Raquel, with these massive high heels on, and she asked me all these questions, and was really sweet. She showed me where the toilets were and everything. I remember going back afterwards, saying: ‘I’ve just spoken to Raquel!’” she recalled, sounding like an excited fan.

When Wainwright joined Coronation Street, Mellor had offered her some advice: don’t stick around for longer than five years, or you’ll never leave. In 1999, at exactly the five-year point, Wainwright left Coronation Street, when her first original TV drama, At Home With the Braithwaites, got the green light. The series, about a woman who wins millions on the lottery but keeps it secret, was an idea Wainwright had been playing with since she was 18. “It really was about my family. The dynamics were very much my mum and dad and me and my sister,” she said. Wainwright wrote herself into it as the shy youngest daughter, Charlotte, who rarely said anything, but always observed.

The show, which first aired on ITV in 2000, ran for four series and helped Wainwright find her voice. But after that she hit a fallow patch, turning out a couple of shows in the mid-2000s that tanked. “That’s the last time I remember feeling worried that I might have to go and work at Sainsbury’s or something,” said Wainwright. “I’d had two flops, so I was a bit persona non grata after all that. Suddenly people who couldn’t wait to meet you before weren’t answering the phone.” As she said this, she did not seem particularly hurt by it. “I never remember feeling that I was not cut out for this. I always knew I was. I always knew I was born to write scripts.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amanda Redman, Peter Davison and Sarah Churm in At Home With the Braithwaites. Photograph: YTV

It was a miniseries called Unforgiven, in 2009, that marked a change in her fortunes. The show followed Ruth Slater, played by Suranne Jones, as she attempted to rebuild her life in and around Halifax, having served 15 years for the murder of two policemen. It was a clear precursor to Happy Valley, in both its noirish tone and subject matter. “It felt like a bloody amazing idea from the second she mentioned it,” said Nicola Shindler, who runs Red Productions, the Manchester-based company that worked with Wainwright for much of the past two decades. “She’s got a wit and a humour about her writing which just brings the story alive,” Shindler said. Unforgiven won awards, and was a turning point for Wainwright, as she shifted from away from lighter drama and comedy towards darker subject matter.

She had asked ITV if she could direct Unforgiven, but they refused: “I said, why? And they said, because you haven’t directed anything. It was chicken and egg.” When she had first considered directing, years earlier, she had ruled herself out. “I just assumed they were people trained to do that and they were there because they’d been on a course,” she told me. But in 2012, when she was writing the first series of Happy Valley, she made it clear that she wanted to direct some of it, too. Her confidence had kicked in. She was sent to the National Film and Television School for a week-long intensive directing programme. “I did the course,” she smiled. “It’s taken a while. I wish I’d done it sooner. I’d know that much more now than I do.”

Before she became a director, if the words on her pages turned into something Wainwright did not recognise, it bothered her, but it took her a while to realise that she was able to speak up about it. “I remember her coming to my house in Leeds, all fired up about something or other,” recalled Mellor. “I said, Sally, you’ve got to say what you think. You had a vision for that character and you have to speak,” Mellor laughed. “Somebody said to me, you were responsible for Sally Wainwright speaking out, now she doesn’t shut up!”

One morning in February 2019, Wainwright was rushing around Soho, putting the final touches to post-production on Gentleman Jack, which was due to premiere on US television two months later. “It’s been a long old haul. I’m really exhausted, mentally and physically, but I’m just so happy,” she said, as she reclined on a sofa in the office of Lookout Point, the production company behind the series’s office. (Wainwright is no longer working with Red Productions, after falling out with Nicola Shindler. The break with Shindler was “awful, very upsetting”, Wainwright said quietly, but would not go into detail. “I think Sally is one of Britain’s greatest writers and I loved our time working together,” said Shindler, by email.)

Wainwright’s feet were up on the table. She was funny, open and blunt, and the intense focus she had on set the previous summer had disappeared into something resembling relief. I asked her if the new series of Happy Valley and Last Tango were taking so long because of the falling out with Shindler. “No, no!” she said. “I’ve literally come back to it as quickly as I could, because of Gentleman Jack.” She had planned to write a third series of Happy Valley as soon as she had the chance, but at the end of 2018, a night out in London with Lancashire and Nicola Walker, who play Caroline and Gillian in Last Tango, had changed her plans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I was just sitting there thinking, I’m having dinner with Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker, and it’s hilarious.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“We had this fucking hilarious evening,” said Wainwright, with the same starstruck wonder that she had when talking about meeting Lancashire years earlier on Coronation Street. “I was just sitting there thinking, I’m having dinner with Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker, and it’s hilarious. They love each other so much, and I was sitting there all entertained by this mad banter going on between them.” The next day, new storylines for Gillian and Caroline kept coming to her. “It just suddenly felt like: ‘Oh fucking hell, let’s do Last Tango.’”

Whether either Last Tango or Happy Valley return in the near future depends on whether Gentleman Jack gets a second season. Wainwright felt jittery about how it would be received. “Because there’s a lot of money involved, and you want the broadcaster and the people who put the money in to think it was money well spent, rather than something that disappears without trace. But also, you want people to see it.”

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By early April, at a preview screening of Gentleman Jack at the BFI in London, Wainwright appeared more outwardly nervous than usual. She knows the show is good, she said, of course, but she wants people to love Anne Lister as much as she does. She has been working on the story for 20 years, and Lister has changed her life. She thinks about her when she struggles, when she worries, as she is prone to do, and wonders, how would Lister face this?

When we spoke in February, she had been emotional over the fact that Gentleman Jack was so close to being out in the world. “I love Anne Lister so much,” she said, her eyes just beginning to water. “It’s not just about ‘I hope people like my show.’ It’s about ‘come and see how brilliant this woman was.’”

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• This article was amended on 17 May 2019. An earlier version said that Band of Gold was set in Leeds, rather than Bradford.