News, Television, Women Writers

“Happy Valley” Creator Sally Wainwright to Pen BBC Series About Anne Lister

Anne Lister: Calderdale MBC Museums

“Happy Valley” won’t return for its third season for at least a year, but Sally Wainwright, the show’s creator, is keeping busy. The writer and director isn’t penning the third installment of the crime drama just yet because she’s working on a series about Yorkshire diarist, mountaineer, traveler, and landowner Anne Lister for BBC, the Guardian writes. Lister has been described as “the first modern lesbian,” and was referred to as “Gentleman Jack” in her hometown of Halifax.

Wainwright shared some details at an event hosted by the Wellcome Trust, a London-based non-profit, last week. The BAFTA winner was named this year’s recipient of the charity’s £30,000 (about $37,000) screenwriting fellowship. Previous recipients include Clio Barnard (“The Selfish Giant”) and Carol Morley (“The Falling”).

Wainwright said she planned to use the funds towards her research into Lister, who died in 1840 and kept a series of personal, intimate diaries that detailed “her intellectual pursuits and lesbian relationships,” the Guardian writes.

The prize includes access to biomedical research and experts at the Wellcome Trust, the largest medical research charity in the world. “What a wonderful thing,” Wainwright said, explaining that Lister “studied human anatomy in Paris in the 1820's among many other remarkable things.” She suggested that there’s no “better place to research that” than the Wellcome Trust.

Wainwright revealed that she does “a lot of research” to prepare for writing projects. “For instance with ‘Happy Valley’ I spoke to a psychiatrist about what it’s like to be a psychopath,” she said.

“The Lister drama will be the second work Wainwright has written for the BBC about pioneering women from her native Yorkshire,” the Guardian notes. She wrote and directed “To Walk Invisible,” a two-hour drama centered on the lives of the three Bronte sisters, set to premiere this month.

“When people talk about my work, and talk about me writing for women, or strong female characters — it’s made me realize how badly women have been served in the past,” Wainwright has said. “I just invented characters I wanted to read about, blissfully unaware that I was doing a feminist thing,” she explained. “But so many female characters are these Airfix kits — little bits put together to make something that’s meant to resemble a woman. And it is quite striking, when you look into the history of telly, that predominantly women have been written by men, and represented through the prism of men’s eyes.”


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