Interpreting the Thin Archive: Anne Lister, Eliza Raine, and Telling School Tales

Abstract

This essay analyzes the queering of female intimacy in girls’ boarding-school culture during the Regency period by examining the relationship between the now-famous diarist, Anne Lister, and her boarding-school intimate companion, Eliza Raine. Although Lister’s diaries are voluminous, they are preceded by Lister’s short years in boarding school, of which there is scant archival documentation. Yet the boarding-school years are not only when Lister had her first serious relationship with another girl, the biracial Eliza Raine, but they appear in later diary entries and correspondence as a kind of founding narrative for both women. Furthermore, Raine’s unique history provides us with important threads linking institutional structures, empire building, race and sexuality, and offers key insights into girls’ boarding-school culture in the long eighteenth century.