Emma Donoghue's Learned by Heart is a historical queer romance novel about forbidden young love
The Irish Canadian author’s latest book fictionalizes a secret relationship at a 19th-century boarding school
Picture this: the year is 1805 and the place is an attic room of a girls' boarding school in England. Two 14-year-old pupils, Anne Lister and Eliza Raine, meet for the first time as roommates — and then fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love.
That's the real-life romance behind Emma Donoghue's latest novel, Learned by Heart. The Irish Canadian writer, best known for her 2010 novel Room, learned of the story 30 years ago as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Her first play, I Know My Own Heart, was written about Lister (often called the first modern lesbian), who chronicled her remarkable life in a five-million-word diary.
"In the, maybe, 30 years that I've been fangirling about her, Anne Lister has come to be better known, but she's still a totally obscure figure," Donoghue tells Q's Tom Power.
[Anne Lister's diary] should have been published centuries ago in multiple volumes, but because of all the lesbian sex, it wasn't.- Emma Donoghue
"She was a rule-breaking, self-educated, brilliant gender nonconforming Yorkshire woman —1791 to 1840 — who left behind possibly the longest diary in the English language. About five million words, about 15 per cent of that is in a secret code she devised to cover anything that she felt a bit private about…. It's this astonishing document, which should have been published centuries ago in multiple volumes, but because of all the lesbian sex, it wasn't."
Lister's diary, which Donoghue says is now available in "raw transcriptions on the internet, courtesy of several hundred volunteer codebreakers," obsessively details everything from the temperature, to the news from France that she read the previous week, to who said what to who at the garden party. "She wrote everything down," the author tells Power.
Raine, Lister's forbidden love interest, was an orphaned biracial heiress who was banished from India to England at age six.
"Eliza Raine is the first of Anne Lister's loves, and the most tragic and the most interesting," explains Donoghue. "Her English father who worked for the East India Company — biggest corporation in the world — he sent her back 'home' as he would have called it…. The journey took almost a year and he was totally cutting her off from her Indian side and her Indian mother.
"There were hundreds and hundreds of these kids, and Eliza Raine and her sister were sent off to England, and Eliza ended up in this boarding school. And we don't know why, but somebody put her in the only two-girl room with the rule-breaking tomboy Anne Lister — and sparks flew."
Listen to Donoghue's conversation with Power for more about Learned by Heart, the author's meticulous research and how she writes about young love.
The full interview with Emma Donoghue is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Emma Donoghue produced by Lise Hosein.
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