#aunt anne lister

[maggiester]

[sopranoentravesti]

Not directly inspired by anything except for *gestures vaguely at the surrounding shitshow* but I do think more people could stand to read this article by Dara Horn about Roald Dahl from 2021.

I’ve included text of the article as well, under the cut. And to head off the whining of those who will perceive this as an attack on their favorite children’s book writer or whatever: read the damn article. This isn’t about “cancelling,” someone for being bigoted (hell, if I boycotted books or plays because the author was virulently antisemitic, there would be precious little to read). It is about understanding a really dark part of human psychology that is at play in conspiratorial thinking— which of course is at the heart of antisemitism— that Roald Dahl capitalized on. Developing a more mature sense of morality, rather than indulging in the bloody politics of blame and vengeance is crucial.

There’s nothing quite like the realization that what you thought was an empowering work of art is actually a 200-page exercise in trolling. It took me more than 30 years to figure out that I’d been trolled by Roald Dahl.

Dahl, who dominated juvenile publishing when I was growing up, revealed himself late in his career to be a vicious antisemite, who thought “powerful American Jewish bankers” ran the US government. He told the New Statesman that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” This was in 1983, the year in which Dahl published The Witches, his 13th novel for children.

Apparently, Dahl had been an antisemite his entire life, but it didn’t prevent him from being essentially canonized after his death in 1990, and it didn’t much affect my thoughts about him either. I had adored his books as a child, and I’ve never taken much interest in the now-obligatory grunt work of connecting artists’ personalities (often horrible) with their works (sometimes great). And although Dahl was not only an antisemite but also (and even more damningly these days) a misogynist and a racist, he hasn’t been canceled yet. Who doesn’t love Roald Dahl, or at least his stories?

Hollywood certainly does. The most recent Dahl adaptation, which began streaming on HBO Max this Halloween season, is called Roald Dahl’s The Witches (note the value of the authorial brand), directed and written by Robert Zemeckis, with the help of two younger Hollywood powerhouses, Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro. It stars the high wattage Octavia Spencer, perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning role in The Help, and A-lister Anne Hathaway, not to mention the voice of the comedian Chris Rock. In fact, this is the second big-budget version of The Witches, the first having been a 1990 film starring Anjelica Huston.

But The Witches was on my mind long before I’d heard about the new movie. It was one of my favorite books when I was a child, one I read repeatedly and pressed into the hands of friends. I was eager to share it with my own children and hesitated only because, as a child, I’d also found it somewhat terrifying. But when I read it aloud to my eight-year-old son last month, I discovered that it was far more terrifying than I remembered, and for entirely different reasons.

The key to Dahl’s success as a children’s author lay in how he pitted children against adults, making children into a beloved underdog class whose moral victory lay in vanquishing their powerful exploiters. His heroes are blameless boys and girls tortured by diabolically abusive adults, whom they destroy in outrageous revenge sequences of the sort even the most fortunate child occasionally fantasizes about. In James and the Giant Peach, for instance, the orphaned James, enslaved by his villainous aunts, squashes them to death with the titular fruit. In Matilda, a kindergartener uses magic powers to terrorize a school principal who routinely locks children in a nail-studded closet. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the starving Charlie, living in the sort of poverty that would make Oliver Twist qualify as a one-percenter, inherits a fantastical candy factory—but only after a book-length morality play in which wealthy children and their entitled parents are absurdly tortured and maimed. In George’s Marvelous Medicine, a boy forced to care for his heartless grandmother concocts a potion that makes her shrink and disappear.

In short, Dahl is like a modern Charles Dickens, except instead of social justice and spiritual redemption, Dahl’s books offer only revenge. Kids, like all emotionally and morally stunted people, eat this stuff up. Dahl tapped into something primal and hideous in the human psyche: the desire of disenfranchised people to feel righteous precisely by demonizing others. As a kid, I bought this too. The sheer sadism of it went right over my head until I shared these books with my children and saw how I’d been punked. And The Witches was the worst.

The Witches is about a boy who is orphaned in the opening chapter—pity points are always crucial for Dahl—and then adopted by his loving Grandmamma, a kindly old lady who fills him in on a little-known scourge. Witches, she explains, are real. They are demons disguised as women, and their sole purpose is to entrap and destroy innocent children through their diabolical magic. One unfortunate boy, for example, went off with a witch and returned unharmed—but later hardened into a stone statue. After vanishing with a witch, a girl reappeared only in a landscape painting in her family’s home, changing positions whenever the family wasn’t watching and even aging as years passed. (That one haunted me for decades.) Other children are “disappeared” in ways worthy of an Argentine junta. Kids better watch out.

One summer on a beach vacation with Grandmamma, our hero wanders into a hotel conference room occupied by a group calling itself the “Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.” In fact, it is a coven of witches discussing their latest plan, a potion designed to turn children into mice. They discover the boy and immediately mouse-ify him, but now that our talking mouse hero knows where they keep their potions, he and Grandmamma hatch a clever plot to administer them to the witches themselves. Hijinks ensue, evil is vanquished, and although the narrator remains a mouse, he doesn’t mind. He and Grandmamma embark on a crusade to take out the witches of the world, and he never has to go to school again.

The book chimed perfectly with the stories of “stranger danger” that other 1980s children and I were constantly fed in state-mandated school curricula, but it made that threat delightfully preposterous—and manageable since all one had to do was believe that certain adults were actually demons with recognizable tells. It was a highly rewarding fantasy. After all, it was clear to me, as it was to every young reader, that even adults who didn’t molest children in shopping malls were nonetheless conspiring against us, making us do dehumanizing tasks like making beds and taking tests. The book was empowering. With its frisson of secret knowledge, it made us feel righteous and invincible. Unfortunately, revisiting it as an adult revealed that the book was cribbed from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—and helped me understand, for perhaps the first time, antisemitism’s seductive appeal.

“Witches,” Grandmamma explains, “are not actually women at all . . . They are demons in human shape.” How do you spot one? Well, since they’re demons, they have toeless hooves instead of feet and claws instead of fingers, disguised by fashionable shoes and gloves. You can’t spot those, but you can spot their “larger nose-holes than ordinary people” (the better to smell you with, my dear). But the real tell, of course, is that witches are bald—which is why a witch always wears “a first-class wig,” which she puts “straight on her naked scalp.”

As I read this aloud to my enthralled son, it was hard to miss how much these witches resembled women in, say, Stamford Hill (the London version of Borough Park). It was also hard to miss how much they resembled caricatures from Der Stürmer or a medieval blood libel. Was I overinterpreting?

You be the judge: “Wherever you find people, you find witches,” Grandmamma tells her innocent grandchild. “There is a Secret Society of Witches in every country. . . . An English witch, for example, will know all the other witches in England.” If this was too subtle, Grandmamma clarifies: “Once a year, the witches of each separate country hold their own secret meeting. They all get together in one place to receive a lecture from The Grand High Witch of All the World.” The boy’s question about this fun fact is, at this point, predictable: “Is she rich?”

Grandmamma replies, “She’s rolling. Simply rolling in money. Rumour has it that there is a machine in her headquarters which is exactly like the machine the government uses to print the bank-notes you and I use.” The boy then asks, as any normal child would, “What about foreign money?” You already know the answer: “Those machines can make Chinese money if you want them to.” Here, the boy turns skeptical: “If nobody has ever seen the Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?” Grandmamma counters, “Nobody has seen the Devil, but we know he exists.” All of this isn’t merely true, we are told, but “the gospel truth” (the italics are Dahl’s). After all, Grandmamma “went to church every morning of the week and she said grace before every meal, and somebody who did that would never tell lies.” As Grandmamma warns her dear boy, “All you can do is cross your heart and pray to heaven.”

Alas, crossing his heart and praying to heaven doesn’t protect our hero from his encounter with the Elders of Witchdom, at which point Dahl drops all pretense. The Grand High Witch, we learn, “had a peculiar way of speaking. There was some sort of a foreign accent there, something harsh and guttural, and she seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter w. As well as that, she did something funny with the letter r. She would roll it round and round her mouth.” The Grand High Witch, in her Yiddish accent, explains to her secret society how they will lure England’s children by buying high-end sweet shops and poisoning the candy, since “Money is not a prrroblem to us vitches as you know very well. I have brrrought with me six trrrunks stuffed full of Inklish bank-notes, all new and crrrisp” (italics mine).

Few children can resist the lure of witches. My son loved the book so much that he wanted to see the movie. Perhaps you are wondering: is the 2020 Hollywood version, whose creators unsurprisingly included plenty of Jews, antisemitic? The short answer is no, or not exactly, but that’s also the wrong question.

Adapting from a source this hideous was never going to be easy or entirely uncontroversial, and the new film has already been slammed for portraying limb differences as evil (instead of the claws mentioned in the book, the film’s witches are depicted with missing fingers). Despite that tone-deaf choice, it’s clear that the filmmakers were aware of the book’s larger problems. To their credit, they knew they had to fix something, and they went big: instead of contemporary England, Roald Dahl’s The Witches takes place in 1968 Alabama, and the protagonist and his grandmother are Black (Octavia Spencer’s Grandmamma is even a voodoo healer). Unlike the 1990 movie, the witches no longer have big noses and are, in fact, racially diverse. At first, this does seem poised to dilute some of the book’s inherent awfulness: when a Black witch attacked the protagonist in an early scene, I had high hopes for a story where “evil” was depicted solely through Marvel Universe methods of pancake makeup and special effects. But that scene proved to be half-hearted tokenism, since the rest of the film focuses almost entirely on, to use the current term, white-presenting witches—and most tellingly, what really distinguishes witches in this film is that they are rich. As we watch a flashback of the lily-white and fabulously dressed Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch attacking an impoverished Black child in a 1920s Alabama shantytown, Grandmamma tells us that “witches always prey on the poor.”

This class warfare idea is utterly absent from Dahl’s book, but it perhaps unintentionally provides a trendy update to his rather old-school racial antisemitism: the idea that a secret society of fantastically wealthy “global elites”—often, but not inevitably, Jews—prey on the poor. This means that bigotry against them, rather than being retrograde, is, in fact, a fresh and righteous way of “punching up.” Instead of just protecting innocent children, this new Grandmamma now also shares her truth to defend the downtrodden, like every righteous nutjob tweeting about the Rothschilds or George Soros. In the book, nothing much happens with the Grand High Witch’s counterfeit cash. But here Grandmamma commandeers it at the film’s triumphant end and hands out hundred-dollar bills to the hotel’s exploited Black employees.

If this sounds tedious, it is. Roald Dahl’s The Witches is wretched less because of the book’s wretched premise than because it is a conventionally lousy children’s movie, full of Hollywood pieties (in the climactic scene, Grandmamma actually lectures the Grand High Witch about the Power of Love), canned stereotypes and recycled animation. That doesn’t mean kids won’t love it, of course. As Hollywood knows well, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory—and that’s the problem.

My kids laughed their way through the movie’s animated mice and cookie-cutter triumphs, enjoying everything that conventional children’s stories do best—reinforce their audience’s expectations, vanquish villains, and make powerless people feel superior. Conspiracy theories make for great stories, but in an era when a nontrivial proportion of the American electorate apparently believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles preys on American children and the country, I couldn’t help feeling that this film was, at the very least, ill-timed.

It is so easy, after all, to believe in a conspiracy, so self-indulgent, so appealing—and, as I now finally understood, so much fun. Watching this mediocre and unremarkable movie left me shockingly ill at ease, precisely because it was so mediocre and unremarkable. My discomfort was compounded by the knowledge that the eight-year-old me would have loved it too, not knowing any better. Few children do. In the elaborate, magical long game of luring innocents into handing over their hearts, it turns out that the Grand High Witch was actually Roald Dahl.

[incorrect-gentleman-jack]

Anne Lister: I'm moderate and peaceful, truth be told.

Ann Walker: Yesterday you threw a chair at my aunt.

Anne Lister: Yes, which was a moderate and peaceful compromise because I was initially planning to launch a table at that bitch.

[wynonnacanitryonyourleg]

also aunt Anne Lister

[lifewithaview]

Suranne Jones in Gentleman Jack (2019) Most Women Are Dull and Stupid

S1E4

Dr. Belcombe confirms that Lister is the perfect tonic for Ann Walker's nervous disorder. When news of a friend's death arrives, Ann's desperate reaction makes Lister suspect that she has secrets of her own.

"Aunt Ann Walker: It appears that you have my niece quite under your spell, Miss Lister.

Anne Lister: Oh ? I rather think she has me under her's."

[whatdoesshedotothem]

Saturday 20 December 1834

8 20

11 ¾

good kiss last night very fine morning F44° at 9 20 am at which hour breakfast - No Washington – unpacking and looking over and siding A-‘s kitchen things from Lidgate (left in the laundry here) till 11 – then off with A- to Cliff hill at 11 ¼ - went 1st to Crownest wondering why Washington had not called – found he had left home in a hurry at 9 – then went to Cliff hill – the workmen going to dinner – I sat 25 minutes there and left A- there – took back the little pamphlet of Reasons for contentment by archdeacon Paley and left a copy of Sir Robert Peel’s letter to his constituents at Tamworth – asked Miss Cliff hill how she wished to be styled having 1st said (in answer to her asking after Mrs Anne Lister) that my aunt called herself Mrs Lister and I should do the same when she had done with the brevet – Miss Cliff hill to be styled Mrs Ann or Mrs Walker - In returning went to Hopkins’ – the sister better - promised to send her a bottle of port wine – then into Lower brea wood, looking for sycamores to take up – then after 2 men, one of them carrying a gun – then examined the wood fence (bad) in Jonathan Mallinson’s land – then to Hannah Green’s – and staid talking about 1 ½ hour – Aquilla would like to take the Mytholm farm and to have a mill – Hannah thinks Robinson’s wire mill must be at liberty soon – had heard he was under notice to quit – asked me if this was true – I said I was surprised at the report and gave no decided answer either way – heard the history and vindication of young Dewhirst etc – Aquilla to come and speak to me and promised not to let the farm without letting Hannah know – from her house to Cliff hill in 18 minutes at 4 33/60 - A- had been waiting anxiously – Sykes still with her planting – home at 5 ½ - Joseph Robinsons salesman for John Hemingway (who has Stock’s Delphs) waiting to tell me, he heard I wanted Trough for John Bottomley’s – would furnish them of any size at 7 ½d per gallon – my tenant Abraham Hemingway carts for him – Mr Beattie was waiting in the drawing room for A- she told him the rent £38 per annum for Grieves’s farm, the tenant to pay all taxes – would not take less – Mr B- would agree rather than miss the place – dinner at 6 ½ - A- and I some time with my father and Marian – then coffee – then came upstairs – sat talking – read from p. 146 to 183 vol. 2 Sismondi on the literature of the South of Europe – then ½ hour with my aunt till 10 10 while A- wrote note to go on Monday morning to Mr Beattie – had considered of his proposal and as he was anxious for an early answer, begged to inform him, she would have pleasure in taking him as tenant - from year to year (he not wishing for a term of years) rent £38 per annum tenant paying all taxes - to be a written agreement - buildings to be put in good tenantable repair - wrote the above of today till 10 ¾ at which hour F43 ¼° - very fine day - kind letter this evening 3 pp. franked by Lord Wharncliffe from Lady Stuart Whitehall

[chocolatepot]

16, 17, 18 for the writing questions! I love your work.

Thank you, kind stranger!

How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Share one of them?

See this answer for the numbers ... To share another fic idea I have in a document, I want to write a Gentleman Jack AU for AUpril (and this one will get done, because I commissioned a graphic for it in Fandom Trumps Hate). Ed = Anne Lister, Stede = Ann Walker, Izzy = Marian Lister, Fang = Aunt Anne, the Badmintons = those assholes that get that kid's leg amputated and have Anne attacked. I think I'm slightly intimidated by how galaxy-brained this concept is, though.

What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)

I stop trying. Sometimes the issue is executive dysfunction and no amount of pushing is going to make my brain work. Sometimes the issue is that I'm too tired or sad or overtaxed, and by worrying about my inability to write I'm making the problem worse. Whatever specific thing I do, the important aspect is to relax and forgive myself for not being able to create.

That, or I try to identify what exact mood/topic my recalcitrant brain is willing to write. Maybe the problem is that all my WIPs are funny and I need to explore a character's pathos. Maybe all my WIPs are very earnest and I need to write a dumb romcom premise. Like when I wrote Talking About Things after many dry days: I needed to write Ed being relaxed and safe enough to discuss a very painful memory.

Do you title your fics before, during, or after the writing process? How do you come up with titles?

It varies! My old faithful method for when I get all the way to inputting on AO3 and still have nothing is to skim through the fic for a key line and steal a phrase from it. Nothing wrong with doing this.

A bit more adventurous is the song lyric method. I've always been a bit self-conscious about this because my music tastes are Not Normal (and not even cool, alternative Not Normal like a goth in a '00s teen movie), but it's worked well for me. I scroll through my Favorites playlist in Spotify until I hit a song that vibes with the fic, and then I listen to it or read through the lyrics and find a line/phrase that works.

Lately I've been naming more fics as I write. The Music Man fic is "Not A Lancelot, Nor An Angel With Wings". The Gentleman Jack fic is "The Knives Are Out".

ask me questions!

[anjellynajolie]

i'm seeing parallels between Jun's aunt and Anne Lister's aunt in Gentleman Jack -- the aunty being the alternative mother figure who truly loves and understands the niece, desires their happiness, and so accepts, implicitly, their queerness. the aunty is a kind of queer figure as well, who forms a family with Jun in the absence of her parents.

[dianastaurasi]

[incorrect-gentleman-jack]

Aunt Anne Lister: Miss Walker and Anne have been in the kitchen for a while now. What could they possibly be doing?

Marian Lister: Making out or something? I dunno.

[In the kitchen]

Anne Lister: *strapping the last few bottles to the Coke and Mentos rocket they've been building*

Ann Walker: This is gonna be sick.

[moghedien]

love Aunt Anne immediately trying to push a Anne into going after Miss Walker as soon as she comes home from her break up.

literally it was such a random and seamless conversation from “oh things went bad with Miss Hobart? Well don’t talk about that, let me tell you about Miss Walker and about how she is rich and lonely and suspiciously unmarried” like Aunt Anne has a gaydar like you wouldn’t believe and is gonna set her niece up given the chance

[senny-c]

when i see sophie rundle kiss someone other than suranne jones

[skittlebits]

Gentleman Jack Re-watch - S1E1 - I Was Just Passing

Three minutes into the episode and we’re reminded that Anne’s father and Aunt both know what Anne ‘gets up to’ and deliberately avoid processing that information further than they need to.

They know something went south with Anne’s arrangement with Miss. Hobart in Hastings and you can tell from their voices they suspect what it was, but again...they aren’t going to speculate in front of company.

Company: Why is Anne coming back to Shibden?

Jeremy & Aunt Anne: Obviously she got dumped again. We just don’t know the details.

-

It’s not long after Anne arrives home when Aunt Anne goes looking for the story.

Aunt Anne has already had the thought of placing Miss Walker in the direct path of her lady-loving niece but it’s here she decides to plant the seeds, so to speak and “ship it” for her niece’s sake.

At the time Anne is still upset about Miss Hobart and is like, ‘yeah, whatever Aunty’, but later on Aunt Anne tries again and suggests one of the Lister sisters should befriend Miss Walker and be a “companion”. She stops short of doing a “nudge nudge, wink wink” because they didn’t do that in 1832, but she might as well have. Anne catches on this time. And oh, just in time too because it’s announced that Miss Walker and her nosy cousins are downstairs!

Cue Anne’s epiphany and her master class in how to woo a lady in the 1830’s (or anytime in history).

Pleasant greeting of others, saving the target of wooing for last

Greet enthusiastically, as though there has never been a more wonderful person to see again

Sit close enough to cause a slight fluster

Take control of the conversation by presenting a well-informed opinion

Include her in said conversation even though she has zero interest and/or knowledge of the topic, and knowing that, masterfully steer her back out of the conversation while making it seem as though she somehow contributed

Observe how she shuts down when a man attempts to woo her and immediately have him yeeted

Blatantly flirt with her while she melts while her cousins look on with their ‘gals being pals’ goggles on

8. Ignore sister rolling her eyes at the performance

Poor Marian.

So the game is on for Anne at this point. She’s going to get Shibden Hall fixed up, look into the coal mining business, and get herself a wife!

The end of the episode is a dream many of us on Tumblr have had...a capable lesbian speed walking showing up on our doorstep to woo us.

(Honestly, Suranne Jones has taken this role and thoroughly owned it)

One last break of the fourth wall before she goes to get her girl..

[lifewithaview]

Suranne Jones and Joe Armstrong in Gentleman Jack (2019) Oh Is That What You Call It?

S1E3

Lister confides her hopes for a future with Ann Walker to her aunt, as Mrs. Priestley's inkling about the two women's relationship presents a threat. Meanwhile, John Booth is surprised at his own romantic success.

[whatdoesshedotothem]

x Monday 17 December 1832

7 ½

11 35

incurred a cross last night thinking of Miss W- fine soft morning F50° at 8 ¼ - breakfast at 8 ½ with my father in 50 minutes - out at 9 ½ and at Lidgate at 10 - Mr Parker came in ½ hour and staid 1 ½ hour on the subject of the administration accounts - told me the commoners want to shut up and offer for sale to me the road in front of Shibden as soon as they opened the Lower brea breach road - Miss W- not quite so well today - had been miserable again about Mr Ainsworth  she read me what she had written as a copy of what she meant to write to her sister   asking her opinion and advice on the subject of my proposal to our living together   she seemed wavering and I said the thing seemed now as uncertain between us as ever    I talked a little sentiment and argued against Mr A- and pressed her hard to decide   and one while proposed not seeing her again till Christmas day   when she expected her sister’s answer   then I brought her round to say she should try to cheer up and that I left her now in the same mind as I did the last time   that is that if her sister approved there would no longer be any obstacle between [us] and she would say a positive and decisive yes she had had another letter from her evidently regretting that she had given up the thought of going abroad with me and as far as Mrs Sutherland well could    advising Miss W- to reconsider the thing    letter today again from Mrs Plowes   saying that they were in better spirits and had determined to sell thirty old revisionary shares   (they have as many more new ones) at the market price   the last sold at one hundred and twenty five pounds a share   we talked of Miss W-‘s taking ten shares   which she having now eight hundred in the bank would leave her about seven hundred for the next half year said I had five hundred at Hammersley’s  and that would do   but then ended by advising her to take only five shares   these to be kept with the view of being one day settled on Mrs Plowes and at her death on her two daughters Henrietta Miss W-‘s goddaughter and Ann her favourite home in ½ hour at 6 20 - James walked with me to the bottom of the water gate - brought a lantern but so windy it blew out twice and we groped on without it - could see prettily well when I had got the lamp light out of my eyes and luckily it was fair  - dressed – dinner at 6 ¾ in ¾ hour – then went into the other room till 8 ½ - then wrote the above of today - I seem as if I would have this girl   when perhaps I should be better without her   at all rates I shall be easily reconciled if she says no – left Pickles this morning getting up largeish young sycamore in the hall wood – it turned out so rainy about 11 ½ am that he went home John tells me saying he would return if it was fine, but I suppose he did not as it was a stormy afternoon tho’ with some gleams – fine as I returned this evening - then wrote the following to go tomorrow morning to Mr Jeremiah Rawson -‘Shibden Hall - Tuesday 18 December 1832 - Dear Sir – if I don’t hear from you respecting the coal before the end of this week, I shall feel myself at liberty to dispose of it - the other party have themselves valued at, and offered me for the upper, or hard bed, the same price at which I said you should have it – I am, sir, etc A. Lister’ – read from p. 80 to 116 Emersons’ history of modern Greece till 10 5 and went to my aunt and then came to my room at 10 35 – very windy rainy night and F49° at 10 50 p.m.

[dhiatzs]

Anne: Improvise. Adopt. Overcome

Marian: Did you mean "adapt"?

Anne: (pouring tea to Ann, her aunt, her father, John an Eugénie) Did I stutter?