Helena Whitbread on cracking a lesbian diarist's code

Helena Whitbread is writing a biography of Anne Lister, who she's been studying for more than three decades. Anne Lister, was a nineteenth-century Yorkshire landowner who, for her time, led a remarkably unorthodox personal life. She was a defiantly unconventional lesbian businesswoman who had a 'wife' and even got married in a church. But it isn't just her lifestyle that makes her so remarkable - it's the minute detail in which she records her sexual exploits. Helena Whitbread, was responsible for the publication of her diaries in 1988, and is currently working on a comprehensive biography.