How Emma Donoghue’s own teenage crush inspired her novel on Anne Lister’s first lesbian love

For her latest book, ‘Learned by Heart’, the Irish-Canadian novelist of ‘Room’ and ‘The Wonder’ depicts pioneering lesbian diarist Anne Lister’s early love affair. She talks to Helen Brown about the intensity of coming-of-age crushes and the American right-wing backlash against queer fiction

‘My interest in women’s history is really a study of confinement’ (Handout)

I suppose I do like to lock people up,” admits author Emma Donoghue. In her devastating Booker Prize-shortlisted 2010 novel Room, the film adaptation of which won Brie Larson an Oscar, the Irish-Canadian novelist trapped her mother and child heroes in a sex offender’s outhouse. Then, in 2016’s The Wonder (made into a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh last year), she put a 19th-century “fasting girl” under a punishing round-the-clock watch, and in 2022’s Haven, she trapped three 17th-century monks on a remote island.

“It comes from my interest in women’s history, which is really a study of confinement,” she explains. “Their griefs and troubles so often stemmed from what they were not allowed to do, or not allowed to go. And in pure literary terms I find it easier to increase the emotional temperature of a story if the characters are limited in their movements and actions.”

She’s at it again in her new novel, Learned by Heart, about an Anglo-Indian girl committed to a Yorkshire lunatic asylum in 1816. “So yes,” laughs Donoghue, “OK, the prison camp vibe is ongoing. And I do feel sheepish when people pick up on it. I think they’re wondering what kind of elaborate power game I’m playing out, taking my dolls and putting needles through their nipples. I’m thinking of the Barbie movie, in case you haven’t seen it,” she says, before slipping off on a tangent: “I had Sindy dolls not Barbies. I gave mine not only ear piercings, but nipple holes – all sorts of holes. Not in a voodoo sense, I wasn’t trying to hurt them. Just… give them a makeover, maybe? Shape them.”

Chatting away merrily via videolink from the Canadian home she shares with her wife, Professor Christine Roulston, Donoghue is a marvellously warm, funny and unfiltered interviewee. On the page she can be slippery, sly and succinct: you can tell she’s also a poet. But in conversation her freewheeling ideas tumble into conspiratorial anecdotes and quirky jokes. When her kids (now 16 and 19) were at primary school, I bet she had all the best playground gossip.

Learned by Heart is based on the real-life love affair between pioneering lesbian diarist Anne Lister (who was portrayed by Suranne Jones in BBC drama Gentleman Jack) and Eliza Raine. The pair met – both aged 14 – at an all-girls boarding school in York in 1805. Orphaned and illegitimate, the daughter of an English surgeon and his Indian “country wife”, dark-skinned, Madras-born Raine didn’t fit the genteel model of the school’s ideal pupil and neither did brusque, boyish and intellectually precocious Lister. So they were shelved together, out of the way, in an attic room where they began a grand romance that saw them pledge to marry as soon as Raine came into her inheritance at 21.

Donoghue notes that while people assume any fiction she sets in the present day “must contain autobiographical details, it’s actually just as easy to use your own experience in historical fiction”. And she drew heavily on her own experience of “falling madly in love”, aged 14, with another girl at a Catholic convent girls’ school in Dublin. Did she ever confess her love to the object of her desire? “Oh no!” she says. “I never told her. I was so sure my feelings weren’t reciprocated and she just thought of me as a slightly intense friend. I only told her years later, during our second year of university. I didn’t even want to tell her in our first year because I was still scared she might go: ‘Arghhh!’ Like I’d jumped out of a cupboard at her, to use the closet metaphor. And it was fine – she was a bit surprised.”

But the crush helped forge the writer that Donoghue would become. Unable to speak about her emotions, she began keeping a diary – like Anne Lister – to “record all the details”. “I packed that diary three lines to a standard line,” she says. “So years later I’m nearly blinded when I try to read it. But the secret love drove me to get it into words. I was desperate to get over it, not to get over being gay but to get over the heartbreak of that particular, unreciprocated love.”

Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay in the 2015 adaptation of Donoghue’s ‘Room’ (A24)

Born in 1969 to Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic), and the youngest of their eight children, Donoghue says realising she was gay “shook me. I thought: ‘Oh my god! They’ll come for me with fiery pitchforks.’” Here, she makes animated comic jabs with an imaginary fork at her computer camera. “But also, because I was getting to see my beloved every day, I remember the blissful times along with the tense and nervous times,” she shrugs. “Surely, when anybody falls in love for the first time, they feel that the world has split open? But that’s particularly true if that love is forbidden – same-sex love, or across lines of race or religion. It’s a love that’s glorious and unspeakable. It means your words are confined along with your feelings.”

Donoghue believes that modern readers respond so well to the story of Anne Lister “not just because she had affairs with other women, but because she wrote about them. She found enjoyment in working things out.” She compares the 19th-century gentlewoman – who’d grow up to dress as well as behave in a confident, traditionally masculine style – to “some kid on TikTok today being all like: ‘Huh! Where exactly do I fall on the spectrum? Are there many spectrums?’” She puts on a quirky, high-speed voice as she pinballs through the questions they might be asking themselves. “I’m like men? But I don’t particularly want to be one. And if I were a man? I’d be cut off from the company of girls.’” Donoghue laughs and shrugs. “Lister had a very direct, scientific or philosophical attitude to her identity. She recorded that she fantasised about having a penis, for instance, which was a remarkable thing for a woman to write down in the 1810s.”

But Lister’s life has already been well explored in biography and fiction. For Donoghue, then, although she had been fascinated by her story for 20 years, she delayed writing about her “until I realised that coming from Eliza Raine’s perspective made things fresh”. She realised that Lister was better able to take her unconventional sexuality in her stride because she was so confident in all other areas: she was white, clever, well-connected and independently wealthy. Whereas Raine was battling prejudice which may well have fed into the mental illness that saw her committed to the asylum. “She was walking a tightrope the whole time, feeling she had to behave immaculately, or she’d be cast out.”

My belief doesn’t include the idea that God will punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t include the idea that God is a he. But there is a core of faith that remains

When we first meet Raine she’s practising her gleaming smile in her speckled looking glass, all the better to offset her “swarthy, dusky, dingy or plain brown” complexion. An anxious people-pleaser, she’s knocked off balance by the arrival of Lister, who gives so little thought to sweetness and neatness. Lister splatters ink on her pages, crams food into her mouth and asks the most impertinent questions of her classmates: quizzing them without judgement on their bodies, beliefs and finances.

Donoghue paints a lively picture of the boarding school community, with all its petty rules, rivalries and alliances. “There was a constant ranking of moral and intellectual status,” she says. “And I focused on the parlour games the girls played, which brought out the moments of inclusion and exclusion. The cruelty and kindness. And the awful passive-aggression of social rules, like how the girls weren’t allowed to ask for food – they had to offer it to a neighbour if they wanted to help themselves.” Donoghue puts on a mean-girl voice: “‘How are YOU enjoying the rhubarb?’ ‘Oh, that looks like lovely roast chicken, want some more?’ Eugh!”

She writes steamily of the two girls’ “beautiful nocturnal invention” in their attic, and chillingly of Raine’s fear of discovery. At one point they feel certain they’ve been caught in the act by another pupil who may tell. “But it’s always dangerous admitting knowledge isn’t it,” Donoghue tells me. “Messengers get shot. It isn’t necessarily kindness that motivates people to keep your secrets.” She reminds me of the Woods Pirie case of 1810, in which a schoolgirl reported that two white, middle class female teachers (Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie) were having a sexual relationship and so every single pupil was removed from the school. The teachers sued the pupil’s family and won, quite probably because the child was half-Indian. “A lot of the interrogation in court was turned back on the child,” sighs Donoghue, who assumes a pompous voice of a racist judge to intone: “‘How did you, smutty little half-Indian girl, know these things? How could you even think these dirty thoughts?’”

Florence Pugh in ‘The Wonder', in which a 19th-century ‘fasting girl’ is put under a punishing round-the-clock watch (AIDAN MONAGHAN/NETFLIX)

Given how much of the homophobia in the cultures she describes comes from the church, I’m surprised to learn that Donoghue still believes in God. “That often surprises – and sometimes appalls – people,” she nods. “But there’s no accounting for how people will respond to a religious upbringing and what will stick.” In her own case, she says she has “shed all the aspects of religion that I don’t like, so what I’m left with is whittled down to… well, not something small exactly. But I’m no longer affiliated with the Catholic church. My belief doesn’t include the idea that God will punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t include the idea that God is a he. But there is a core of faith that remains, although I try not to assume that’s a belief that my readers share.”

In fact, she thinks of her readers as “default atheists” and writes about faith “in such a way that they might catch that distant music and have some understanding of why another person might have faith. Similarly, I hope that if I’m writing about lesbian love in 1805 I hope that readers will be able to hear that music too. Because if novels are good for anything it’s making you feel something you wouldn’t have felt on your own.”

She argues that historical fiction offers an intriguing space for discussion about “which aspects of our personalities are ‘pure essence’ and which are socially constructed”. She enjoys allowing readers to draw close to a character, then “letting them say something awful about the servants or the slave trade. It causes a recoil. It’s like a dance – you get close to a character and then they’re suddenly spun away from you.” She thinks we are “often drawn to people like Anne Lister because they seem to be ahead of their time. They’re like bridge characters and we can feel what makes them tick a little more easily than their more conventional peers.”

Because Lister would go on to treat her lovers quite selfishly, I’ve heard it said that she casually packed Raine off to the asylum. But Donoghue says that really wasn’t the case. “Most teenage relationships break up,” she says. “The idea that Anne would hang around until Eliza turned 21 and inherited her money isn’t very realistic. But it is absolutely tragic, given that Eliza needed this great love so much. She had nothing else and when it came, her money clearly wasn’t enough. It didn’t enable her to live a very independent life. There’s a very poignant account in her letters of her attempt to live alone in Bristol for a year. But she had nobody to talk to because a lone woman can’t possibly introduce herself to anybody. She had nobody to make those introductions and so she was missing a link. She was completely isolated and friendless and had to drift back to Yorkshire where she knew a few people.”

Donoghue has wondered if Raine would have been more mentally stable if she’d had a more conventional life. “But that didn’t happen, because she met Anne Lister, who set her on a much more difficult path which led her into the wilderness.” By her mid-twenties she was clearly struggling, and Donoghue says her surviving letters reveal moods that “swung from grandiosity to self-abasement and back again”.

Modern readers might retro-diagnose Raine as bipolar and Lister as autistic. Donoghue suspects as much – “but those labels didn’t exist back then”. An optimist, she’s “hugely cheered” by “how blasé teenagers are today about ‘coming out’ as all sorts of things. Not just as gay. As autistic, and so on. They’re owning all the categories that people were afraid of. The idea of that closet door swinging open is such a liberation for so many things.” And she finds it “thrilling that they use words like ‘gaslighting’ if they feel anybody is trying to mess with their sense of what’s true”.

But while Donoghue is delighted at the steadily rising “popularity and playfulness” of queer fiction in Britain and Canada, she’s sad to report that things are very different in the US. “In the States, publishers are trembling over sales of books for young readers with queer and diverse themes. Booksellers and school librarians are afraid to buy them and there has been a catastrophic fall in sales. They’re really feeling the right-wing backlash.” I suggest the confinement of which she writes still exists for gay teenagers growing up in some American towns and she nods, seriously. “Luckily for those with access, the internet is an underground railroad. Stories can still get in and out.”

‘Learned by Heart’ is out now, published by Picador