The history of Eliza Raine (1791–1860) is full of gaps and puzzles. She was born in Madras—now Chennai—on the southeast coast of India. Her father, William Raine, was a Scarborough-born head surgeon for the East India Company. Nothing is known of the name, age, family, ethnicity, or religion of the woman who lived with him for at least a dozen years (1788–1800). Both times he took a daughter to be baptised (Eliza on 14 July 1792), he put down “mother unknown,” a customary euphemism to draw a veil over a partnership theoretically taboo but accepted in practise.
I’ve found just one reference in Eliza Raine’s surviving letters to her being familiar, as a child, with “one of those very singular dialects of the East” (23 September 1812); one to her having “sprung from an illicit connection” (30 August 1812); one to her being a “lady of colour” (5 July 1811).
In 1797, at six and eight respectively, Eliza and her sister, Jane, were sent to England. Also on board were their father’s friend Colonel Cuppage with his six children, whose French-speaking ayah, Louisa, may have looked after the Raines as well as the Cuppages on the long voyage. We don’t know where in England the Raine girls were between 1798 and 1803. Their father took furlough and sailed for home in 1800, but died on the voyage. His estate recorded payments to “Dr. Raine’s woman” of twenty-four pounds a year, but she only outlived him by two. Eliza and Jane were left four thousand pounds each, payable on marriage or at the age of majority (twenty-one); the trustees were London bankers Thomas Coutts and Coutts Trotter, Raine’s sister’s daughter Lady Mary Crawfurd, and his Irish colleague and friend William Duffin.
The first document I’ve seen in the hand of Eliza Raine is a timetable and list of pupils and teachers she drew up, at twelve, at Miss Cameron’s school in Tottenham, West London. It has York as her hometown, which suggests that by now Duffin and his Indian-born wife, Elizabeth Rule Duffin, were acting as the Raines’ guardians. The Duffins seem to have taken the biracial heiress of another of his dead colleagues under their wing too: Hugh Montgomery’s daughter Anna Maria Montgomery (b. 1784) gave her address as their country house at Nun Monkton when she married a York man called William James, and the couple would remain loyal friends to Jane and Eliza. (This is just one of many interesting connections unearthed for me by the outstanding genealogist San Ní Ríocáin.)
At some point in the second half of 1805, Eliza Raine drew up another list at Miss Hargrave’s Manor School in York, where she was now a boarder and Jane a day girl. In a later letter she recorded that she’d first met Anne Lister on 2 August 1804, but not where. (I’ve imagined a first encounter at Dr. Hunter’s, since Lister’s aunt Anne was a close friend of his wife’s, all the York doctors were acquainted, and the Hunters entertained a lot.) Lister and Raine only seem to have overlapped at the Manor School for about a year, when they were fourteen and fifteen.
Lister left the Manor School in the summer of 1806. (I’ve seen no evidence for the story that she was expelled from this or any of her previous schools.) The first known surviving entry in her diary was prompted, on 11 August 1806, by the end of a long visit from Raine to the Listers: “Eliza left us.”
Raine became particularly attached to Lister’s mother, Rebecca Battle Lister, and corresponded with her in the fond tones of an adopted daughter. She stayed at the Manor School for one more year, after which she and Lister spent stretches of time together at Lister’s parents’ in Halifax, and at the Duffins’ in York and Nun Monkton.
By 1808, the lovers were using the Latin for happy, felix, as a cover word for sex. Given that they used the same secret “crypt hand” in parts of the diaries that Lister kept from 1806 on and Raine more briefly (July 1809 to November 1810), Raine may possibly have contributed something to the code’s development, though its use of Greek and algebraic elements make it much more likely to be Lister’s invention; Lister would use it for roughly one-sixth of her massive journal for the rest of her life.
When apart, the lovers wrote to each other constantly, not only by the post but via intermediaries, including Lister’s parents and aunt Anne, Miss Hargrave and her family at the Manor School, and other teachers and friends, such as the Priestleys. They planned to “go off together” as soon as they came of age—probably to Italy. (Unless that was, or gradually became, more of a metaphor? Later Lister sometimes used the phrase “going to Italy” to mean consummation or a settled partnership.)
As for Jane Raine, she married an army officer called Henry Boulton and returned to India in 1808. When she came back two years later—without her husband, drinking heavily, and pregnant—she was a source of shame to her sister. (That 1810 pregnancy doesn’t seem to have produced a child, but San Ní Ríocáin has discovered that in 1815 Jane did give birth to a son, named Raine Boulton, who died at twenty-two months, with a burial address of Brunswick Square, the location of the Foundling Hospital.)
While waiting to “go off” with Lister, Raine studied French, history, geography, geometry, and botany; she wrote poems and songs and did a lot of sketching. Her letters referred civilly to the Duffins and their friend Mary Jane Marsh, who was part of the household by about 1809 and would become the doctor’s second wife. (The notion that Elizabeth Duffin was an invalid, and Marsh her companion or a sort of governess to the Raine girls, seems based on a mistranscribed phrase in a letter.) Sometimes Raine lived away from the Duffins for long stretches—with her irritable cousin Lady Mary Crawfurd in Doncaster, and on her own (except for a maid) in Halifax and York—but had no permanent home.
Slowly Raine came to terms with the fact that Lister was never going to settle down with her. As early as 1808, Lister’s eye was caught by the first in what would be a series of other women, Maria Alexander. Next and more seriously, from about 1810, Lister became involved with a mutual friend of hers and Eliza’s, six years older, with rank and money: Isabella Norcliffe.
On the back of a note of Raine’s to Lister on 27 November 1811, written after the letter had been through the post, is a poem about memory that could be by either of them, though its aching nostalgia sounds more like Raine to me:
Good night my friend may sweetest slumbers close
Thy wearied eyes in undisturbed repose
May watchful angels guard thy hallowed bed
And heavenly visions float around thy head
Long dreams of blissful happiness be thine
Long thought of her whom I adore be mine
Now sleep away with all thy shadowy train
For retrospection’s fairy queen shall reign
’Tis she alone can every joy restore
Bid flowers revive that dyed to bloom no more
Snatch from oblivion’s stream dead pleasure’s ghost
Teach hope to promise what we value most
’Tis she alone when sorrow’s faded form
Sighs in the wind and rides upon the storm
Bids the fast starting tear forget to flow
Dries up the spring and stems the course of woe.
By the time they came of age—the deadline for all their great plans—Raine had forced herself to accept that Isabella would be “the partner of your future years” (6 September 1812). But she stayed single-mindedly devoted to Lister and hinted that she would be glad to share a house with the couple. She made a will leaving Lister almost everything, and in the meantime continued to give her large sums out of her income of four hundred pounds per annum.
Starting adult life on her own seems to have knocked Raine off-balance. She had a wide acquaintance in the north of England, but some of her friendships (e.g., with Miss Marsh’s sister Mrs. Greenup) went sour, and there are hints that Lister’s family began to resent her presence, perhaps suspecting her of trying to marry Sam. She ruffled feathers by how she spent her money, for instance when she had tables inlaid with her coat of arms. But she also panicked about debts and deferred to Lister and her former guardian Duffin on matters financial and practical.
Courted by a local navy captain, John Alexander (Maria’s younger brother), Raine enraged him and his friends by pulling back on the grounds of her prior commitment to Lister. Likely in a vain attempt to spur her beloved to jealousy, Raine confessed to her that she was actually in love with his oblivious friend Lieutenant John William Montagu. John Alexander would seem to have been a viable suitor, but William Duffin (who assumed he’d sexually seduced Raine) sent him packing. After trying the experiment for her health of a milder winter in Hot Wells, Bristol—where she found herself miserably isolated—Raine concluded that she’d have to live in or around York, for lack of connections anywhere else.
Retrospective diagnosis is a fool’s game, but in some of her surviving correspondence from as early as 1810, we can read hints of mental trouble: dramatic quarrels and reconciliations, self-denigration, delusions of grandeur, paranoia, mania, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Equally, as late as the second half of 1814, Raine often sounds rational, mature, independent, and cheerful.
When Lister fell for their and Isabella’s friend Mariana Belcombe, by about 1813, Raine had trouble hiding her bitterness, since the new passion seemed to make a mockery of her having nobly given up Lister to Isabella. Of the constant flow of letters between Raine and Lister, starting in 1806, that came to an end in 1814, fewer than a hundred survive—mostly Raine’s to her “darling husband,” rather than vice versa, for the simple reason that the papers that ended up with Lister (apart from the “school letters” she burned at Raine’s request) were carefully preserved for the next two centuries, whereas almost everything in Raine’s possession would be lost.
Raine’s life fell apart when she was twenty-three. The crisis was prompted by Jane turning up again in a helpless state, and Eliza—instead of turning to Duffin—taking the initiative in bringing her sister to their old friends Anna Maria and William James in the capital, and consulting a doctor about whether Jane should be committed to an asylum. The what-if moment I find most tantalising is in September 1814, when Eliza left Jane in lodgings in London, and got an invitation from the Jameses to come to the seaside with them. . .but instead she insisted on going back to York. There, partly prompted by the quarrel over her handling of Jane, and partly by her feelings of being neglected in the Micklegate household, she broke with the Duffins and Mary Jane Marsh, telling them that she’d stifled her resentment of them for years.
At this point a series of letters from Marsh to Lister denounced “black” Raine, a ruthless snob and social climber, for her “black heart” and “black blood.” This vicious prejudice is revealed nowhere else in the writings of their circle, who shared Raine’s unspoken policy of not mentioning her colour any more than her illegitimacy. Lister’s diaries of the time are missing (probably burned at Mariana’s wish), and she doesn’t seem to have made any response to Duffin or Marsh about Marsh’s racism; in fact, having heard their version of the breach first, she took their side and wrote to rebuke Raine for her “misunderstanding.”
Raine fled to the Belcombes, whether for Mariana’s support or her father’s expertise as a mind-doctor. Around 31 October, apparently voluntarily, she entered Clifton House, the small private asylum outside York that Alexander Mather (known to Lister and Raine from the Manor School) and William Belcombe had opened the previous year. Raine now made a new will, dated 21 November, leaving almost everything to her former suitor John Alexander. (Duffin claimed she’d actually written it in late October, before going to Clifton, but had misdated it, rendering it invalid; later he burned this will, which I think may in fact have been a valid one.) Raine’s last surviving letters to Lister at the end of 1814 were written with Mrs. Belcombe looking over her shoulder, so should be taken with a pinch of salt: they’re full of apology for her rage, gratitude to the Belcombes for saving her life, and hopes of a rapid recovery from insanity.
To be strictly fair to Raine’s relatives, friends, and medical staff: they didn’t save her from the asylum, but I’ve seen no evidence that they forced or tricked her into it, or plotted to keep her there, whether out of hostility or with any view to stealing her money. For the first year or so, according to Duffin and Marsh (who now pitied Raine as mad rather than bad), her times of “wildness” alternated with stretches of lucid rationality. She often refused to see old friends, and never seems to have asked to leave Clifton House. Much of her behaviour around this time sounds merely unacceptable in a young lady—whims, obstinacy, cunning, verbal aggression—rather than proof of serious mental disturbance. Marsh was the only one who ever mentioned Raine’s ethnicity, and only for a brief period in autumn 1814, but her virulence on the subject, for which no one seems to have taken her to task, suggests that racism at least contributed to the general interpretation of Raine’s behaviour as pathological.
Lister was deeply shaken by Raine’s condition and visited her on occasion when she came to York. Business-minded, she pushed for Raine to be declared a lunatic by an official commission so that once she was a Ward in Chancery, the Lord Chancellor could appoint guardians to manage her care and property. Lister proposed herself for this role, as the heir named in what she and Duffin assumed was Raine’s only valid will. But after Raine’s Commission of Lunacy was held in 1816, it was Lady Crawfurd who was made her personal guardian, with Duffin and Robert Swann the banker (father to her schoolmate Mary Swann) entrusted with her financial affairs.
It is tantalising to wonder whether Raine’s worsening symptoms, as the years went by, were the result, rather than the cause, of her being locked up. And whether, if she’d been less of an oddity (as a rich biracial spinster in love with a woman) in Regency England, or had a loyal family or partner demanding and working for her release, she might—like many other asylum patients—have managed to rejoin society.
The year Jane Raine died of consumption, 1819, Lady Crawfurd moved Eliza to live under the round-the-clock supervision of a Mrs. E. Barker and her daughters in Grove Cottage on Lord Mayor’s Walk in York, in the vain hope that she might improve when away from “the insanes.” In 1823, Lister describes Raine as frequently playing the piano there. But by her early forties—Marsh (now Duffin’s second wife) blamed Raine’s “change of life”—she was up so much at night, and spitting and lashing out so often, that the distressed Barkers put her in a straitjacket. In July 1835, the Duffins and Lister brought Raine back to Clifton House Asylum so she could be kept under “stronger control,” which Lister was convinced saved Raine’s life.
In 1839, Lister instructed the solicitor Jonathan Grey that in the event of Raine’s death while Lister was abroad, he should make a claim to her estate on Lister’s behalf. But it was Lister who died the following year, at forty-nine, on her travels with her partner Ann Walker (the last of some dozen lovers) in what is now Georgia.
John Swann (Mary’s brother) replaced his father as Raine’s property guardian, and Mrs. Marsh Duffin was the new personal guardian; she reported that Raine seemed happier. By 1840, Raine was in a new asylum, Terrace House in Osbaldwick outside York, but the 1841 Census recorded her as back in Clifton House; when it closed down in 1853, she was returned to Osbaldwick. Raine died of a stomach haemorrhage at sixty-nine, on the last day of 1860. In the absence of any heir, the estate of this “bastard and lunatic” (grown to some eight thousand pounds) went to the Crown.
Anne Lister changed my life. Back in 1990, ducking out of the rain into a Cambridge bookshop, I spotted one of those unmistakable Virago green spines, which turned out to be Helena Whitbread’s groundbreaking first collection of decoded excerpts from Lister’s journals, I Know My Own Heart (1988). This kick-started my career in three different ways. A paper I gave about Lister led to the commissioning of my first book, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (1993), an attempt to satisfy my curiosity about what this unique Regency Yorkshirewoman could have read that shaped her confident sense of her own “oddity.” I loosely adapted Helena’s collection into my first play, also called I Know My Own Heart, about Lister in her twenties. It was staged in 1991 as a graduate-student production, with me stepping in at the last minute to replace the actor due to play Isabella Norcliffe; Helena Whitbread not only came to see it, but introduced me to her agent, Caroline Davidson, who’s guided my career ever since. The play got its professional premiere with Glasshouse Productions in Dublin in 1993; published in 2001, it can be found in my Selected Plays.
Then, in 1998, I was Writer in Residence at the University of York for two months, and my partner, Chris Roulston, was a Fellow of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, with an office in King’s Manor. When we realised that this was the building where Lister and Raine had shared a bedroom known as the Slope in 1805–6, I felt a sharp nudge and began to jot down my first ideas for this novel. So in a sense, Learned by Heart has been two and a half decades in the making, and I’ve been fascinated by Lister and her dozen or so lovers for more than three.
What’s changed over that time is not just our culture’s belated readiness for the extraordinary Anne Lister, but an exponential opening up of the primary and secondary sources. Mostly thanks to Sally Wainwright’s brilliant BBC/HBO drama series Gentleman Jack (2019–22)—as unconventional as its subject, and all based on her own words—Lister is finally famous for her five-million-word diary, which UNESCO has named a National Treasure. Wainwright devoted the proceeds of a screenwriting award to digitising the journals and has funded a PhD scholarship for ongoing study of Lister; I know of no other showrunner who grasps so well how history and entertainment can work hand in hand, or who’s done half as much for the archive on which she draws.
I want to thank Helena Whitbread for taking the time to show Chris and me Shibden Hall and the Lister diaries at West Yorkshire Archive Service in Halifax in 2015, as well as answering my endless queries since then. Our friends Fiona Shaw (the writer) and Karen Charlesworth showed us around King’s Manor, Holy Trinity Church, and other Lister haunts, and Professor Christopher Norton kindly gave me a painstaking architectural tour of King’s Manor in 2022.
These days, those curious about Lister can turn to Whitbread’s two volumes of selections from the 1817–26 diaries, Jill Liddington’s three about 1833–38 (the basis for Gentleman Jack), and biographies by Anne Choma and Angela Steidele. The Lister fandom is exceptional in doing participatory research, so readers can now immerse themselves in her complete, unedited diaries online, transcribed by an international network of more than a hundred volunteer “Code Breakers” under the aegis of West Yorkshire Archive Service.
By comparison, Eliza Raine is still appallingly neglected. Some of her correspondence with Lister first saw the light in Muriel Green’s 1939 thesis “‘A Spirited Yorkshirewoman’: The Letters of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, Halifax, 1791–1840,” though Green did all she could to hide the fact that they were lovers. Many more letters were usefully transcribed by the late Patricia Hughes in a self-published 2010 study (The Early Life of Miss Anne Lister and the Curious Tale of Miss Eliza Raine), which is unfortunately full of confusions and guesses presented as fact. There remain scores of crucial unpublished letters and other writings by, to, and about Raine, mostly from 1803 to 1815, which I’ve been able to study only thanks to the generous help of archivists and Code Breakers, including Jude Dobson, Steph Gallaway, Kerstin Holzgräbe, Jane Kendall, Livia Labate, Chloe Nacci, Marlene Oliveira, Jessica Payne, Alex Pryce, Amanda Pryce, Francesca Raia, Lynn Shouls, Shantel Smith, and Kat Williams. This is the first time in my career I’ve owed a debt to crowdsourced research, and I’m deeply grateful to Steph Gallaway of PackedWithPotential.org (a hub for all things Lister) for making it happen.
Diane Halford brought key material to my attention, and when I reached out to David Hughes on Twitter, he decoded and transcribed a journal passage for me overnight. Anne Choma let me pick her brains; Frances Singh—the scholar who discovered that Raine was sent to England at the age of six rather than eleven—showed me scans of passenger lists; Helena Whitbread, Christina Grass, and Carol Adlam (whose biography of Raine I anticipate with great excitement) shared with me invaluable unpublished material. But above all, I need to thank San Ní Ríocáin—@SRiocain on Twitter—who responded to my relentless questions over the course of a pandemic year and has somehow managed to establish accurate histories for everyone from William Raine and his Yorkshire family, to the Duffins, to Eliza’s schoolmates, friends, and teachers.
As a biracial child of the Subcontinent, sent “home” to a Britain she’d never seen, Raine was isolated in York, but she was not unique. What some called “country marriage” or “concubinage” between a Company man and an Indian girl or woman (often known as his bibi) declined from extremely common to rare and stigmatised over her lifetime. (One in three Company men’s wills from 1780 to 1785 included bequests to native companions, one in four in 1805–10, one in six by 1830, and very few by midcentury.) In this novel I’ve tried to fill gaps in the personal history that Raine kept under such tight wraps, and to do so, I’ve drawn on the widely varied fates of several hundred other eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century children, including Sarah Rudd (sometimes called Redfield or Radfield) Thackeray Blechynden, half-sister to the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray; Margaret Stuart Tyndall-Bruce; Mir Glulum Ali, Sahib Allum, renamed William George Kirkpatrick, and Noor un-Nissa, Sahiba Begum, renamed Catherine/Kitty Aurora Kirkpatrick, later Phillips, as well as their cousins Cecilia and William Benjamin Kirkpatrick; Banu “Ann” de Boigne and Ali Baksh “Charles Alexander” de Boigne; the Indian children of Johan Joseph Zoffany, the painter; the seven to ten children of Hercules Skinner; the eleven children (by two mothers) of Isaac Meyers; the seven children (by three mothers) of Henry Wray; the six or more children of Sir David Ochterlony by several of his thirteen concubines; the six children Gerard Gustavus Ducarel had with Sharaf-un-Nisa, renamed Elizabeth Ducarel, one of the handful of mothers who settled in England and had an Anglican wedding; and Jane Cumming Tulloch, witness in the Woods-Pirie trial of 1810 (inspiration for Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour). Very few of the bibis converted to Christianity; some of the children were raised Hindu or Muslim by their mothers, but most seem to have been baptised Anglican, with no mother named. Some fathers bequeathed part or all of their fortunes to their (a common phrase) “brown children”; others abandoned or denied any connection with them. J. A. Cock, Hugh Adams, and Samuel Kilpatrick left their companions money only on the cruel condition that they agree to hand over the children to be educated in England. For more on these mothers, sons, and daughters, I recommend Durba Ghosh’s Sex and the Family in Colonial India (2006).
The many graffiti I quote can still be read on the windows of what’s now called the Huntingdon Room at King’s Manor, though the tiny panes seem to have been moved around. The dates range at least from the 1740s to the 1930s; they were first noted in print in Yorkshire Notes and Queries (1885–88) but are crying out for a complete transcription and analysis. The sole account I’ve found of being a pupil at the Manor School is by an Eliza Fletcher, who boarded there around 1781 (in the time of Ann Vaslet Hargrave, mother to Miss Ann Hargrave and Mrs. Mary Hargrave Tate, who were running the school in 1805). Among the forty or so pupils in 1805, contemporaries of Lister and Raine’s age included Raine’s first friend Frances Selby (later Thorpe), Margaret Burn (later Holmes), Elizabeth Foster, Ann Moorsom, and Frances Peirson, and I’ve drawn on what details San Ní Ríocáin and I could dig up about these real women. Mercy Smith, Hetty Marr, and Miss Dern are fictional, but one of the Percival sisters, Ann Georgina (aged seven), did die at the school in the spring of 1806.
On 10 January 1804, the teacher M. A. Lewin sent her friend Arthur Murphy (the Irish playwright) vivid details about the Manor, including its granary, its live-in pig, and several of her colleagues, as well as her and Mrs. Morrice’s move north from Hammersmith; this sole surviving letter of hers was by great luck preserved in his 1811 biography, where San Ní Ríocáin found it. The music and drawing masters, Matthew Camidge and Joseph Halfpenny, had long and distinguished careers in York outside of their duties at the Manor. By 1823, Frances Vickers was running a boarding school on Coney Street, and Hannah Robinson was listed as a schoolmistress on St. Andrewgate. Mary Hargrave Tate’s husband, the bankrupt dancing master, is very likely the same Thomas Tate who died in York Asylum (notoriously harsh under Dr. Hunter’s rule) in 1808. I’ve borrowed other details of boarding-school life from the memoirs of Dora Wordsworth, Mary Botham Howitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wright Sewell, Frances Power Cobbe, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Eugénie Servant, and the Woods-Pirie trial of 1810.
In 1819, Lister mentioned in her diary that Alexander Mather had attended on Eliza at the Manor School and that Dr. Duffin thought him clever, but “in proof of the man’s abilities I shammed Abraham for a week—he never found it out.” (As surgeons by training, though working in general practise, Raine, Mather, and Duffin were properly addressed as Mr., whereas as a physician with a university medical degree, Belcombe was entitled to the superior title of Dr., but since Raine was sometimes called Dr. Raine in Indian sources, I have erased this confusing distinction and called them all Dr.)
There’s no hard evidence of the lovers gate-crashing the Assembly Rooms, just a strong hint from Lister, who in 1831 recorded telling Vere Hobart about her maid Cameron going to a ball: “said what fun to go & dance with her in disguise—but I never did those things now. . .Spoke of going to a ball disguised (or at least insinuated more than said) when at the Manor. I meant that in the great old audience, there I was, in the room.” Black’s Rarities really were on show at the Sycamore Tree in York’s Minster Yard at that time, and “first woman jockey” Alicia Thornton did lose due to a slipping sidesaddle at York Racecourse, though in 1804; in 1805, she came back and won.
My work converged with that of my beloved Chris Roulston in a joint obsession during the monotony of COVID-19, when I was drafting Learned by Heart and she was writing “Interpreting the Thin Archive: Anne Lister, Eliza Raine, and Telling School Tales” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 55, no. 2 [Winter 2022]) as well as editing (with Caroline Gonda) the first essay collection on Lister, Decoding Anne Lister: From the Archive to Gentleman Jack (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Chris is, as Lister said of books, “my spirit’s oil without which its own friction against itself would wear it out”—and this one is dedicated to her.