It strikes me that Catherine Cawood from “Happy Valley” and Anne Lister were both Yorkshire women who cared about their communities.

With Anne Lister it was slightly different, in that it was her estate and she had about 25 tenants. So it was her world and she did refer to them as “my people,” and she was very good to them. She could be hard on people — if they weren’t pulling their weight she wouldn’t think twice about evicting them. But there were people that did work hard and she looked after them. She often [paid for] people’s kids to be educated. That’s different from Catherine, who had a beat overseeing a massive landscape and was paid to do it. But she did care at quite a deep level. It’s an interesting thought, that parallel.

One thing that sets “Gentleman Jack” apart from your earlier work is that, as Anne, the actress Suranne Jones occasionally looks into the camera and addresses the viewer. Is that your way of re-creating the intimacy of the diary?

Absolutely. I thought long and hard about [whether] we wanted her to address the camera, because it’s something that a lot of people do now, with varying degrees of success. So I was quite nervous about whether to do it or not, and indeed, how to do it. We did it very sparingly, and we only did it when we felt absolutely justified. But the thinking behind it was definitely that [feeling] of intimacy with her audience. When you’re reading her most intimate thoughts in the journal, it does feel like you’ve got a direct line to her.

Why do you think she kept the diary?

She didn’t want to forget things, particularly in business. If she’d done a deal with someone, she would make a record of everything down to the last halfpenny. But I also think she was a compulsive writer. She took great pleasure in actually putting it down in black and white and in recording her relationships with other women, because then she could relive them.