The Secret Code Anne Lister Invented to Write About Sex

Anne Lister kept a diary for 25 years, and by the time she died in 1840 it ran to roughly five million words across 26 volumes, dwarfing even Samuel Pepys' famous journal by a factor of four. Most of it reads like any other 19th-century gentrywoman's record: the weather, her coal business, calls paid and received. About a sixth of it isn't like that at all. Woven through the ordinary entries is a private code of her own invention, and inside that code is one of the most detailed first-person...