In July of 2018, a small ceremony was held outside of Holy Trinity Church, a small, squat, stone building in York, England, that dates back to the 12th Century. The ceremony was to unveil a blue plaque, with rainbow edges (the first of its kind in the UK), celebrating a “gender non-conforming entrepreneur” who had done something notable in that place. The entrepreneur was Anne Lister, a woman who lived, for much of her life, in nearby Shibden Hall, a grand Yorkshire estate that she inherited in the early 1800s following the death of her aunt. Lister was not just a landowner—she was also an adventuress, an intrepid traveler who made her way through Europe and Asia, keeping a four-million word diary in which she described her journeys in intense and intricate detail. She was also a lesbian, more or less openly—or at least as openly as a person could be in a conservative agrarian community in the 1830s.

Her plaque ended up outside Holy Trinity because that was where, on Easter Sunday 1834, she took communion with her then-lover, the wealthy heiress Ann Walker, and the two considered themselves to be wed in the eyes of God. The church now heralds this date as the one of the first marriage rites performed for two women in love, though at the time this was not the language any clergy would have used. Lister and Walker had to more or less hide their nuptials from others and refer to themselves as mere “close companions” as they travelled together and cohabitated at Shibden Hall. What a difference two centuries can make.

The plaque at Holy Trinity was just a small part of a broad surge of interest in the dapper woman whom scholars have taken to calling one of “the first modern lesbians” in England; call it Listermania. The revival has been a long time coming. It began in 1983, when a Helena Whitbred, a historian in Halifax, was looking for a research project to sink her teeth into near her hometown. She had heard legends about Lister, but there was little documentation; still, she decided to poke around. She began to look into the Calderdale Archives, hoping to find a few letters by or about Lister; what she discovered instead was a treasure trove. She found Lister’s extensive, scandalous diary, which at the time was written in a hieroglyphics-esque code in order to disguise her breathless prose about her Sapphic activities. Whitbred spent years cracking and unscrambling the code, and then published three collections of Lister’s private writing, beginning with I Know My Own Heart, in 1988.

Whitbred’s scholarship opened the door to a whole new vein of lesbian history. The diaries were written with such precision, and such unabashed erotic prose, that they filled in decades-long gaps in historians’ understanding of queer life in England at the time. Biographies began to accrue. In 1998, the historian Jill Liddington published Female Fortune, a book about women landlords that centered on Lister. Liddington’s book landed in the hands of the screenwriter and showrunner Sally Wainwright, best known for creating the detective procedural Scott & Bailey and the family saga Last Tango in Halifax in the UK, and the Netflix crime procedural, Happy Valley, in the United States. Wainwright became instantly possessed by Lister’s life, her swagger, her Don Juan-like seductions of society women around the world. Hailing from Yorkshire herself, and having visted Shibden Hall regularly as a child, Wainwright felt that Lister’s story was one she was destined to tell.

Lister was a perfect television heroine: brash, cocksure, rebellious, dressed in dandy black dresses that looked almost like men’s suits. “She was very charismatic in real life,” Wainwright recently told the New York Times about Lister’s appeal. “It’s clear from the journal that people liked being with her and that she always had plenty to say. Women probably did like her hugely because she gave them a sense of their own worth somehow—that women could be like this. They didn’t have to be these little bits of decoration.”