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I’m on vacation this week and will be taking a break from publishing this newsletter while I’m away, but will be back to my regularly scheduled programming the following week. Happy summer!

While Season 1 of the BBC series Gentleman Jack is about the terrifying experience of falling in love, Season 2 turns its attention to the equally terrifying prospect of sacrifice and devotion. For Anne Lister (Suranne Jones) and her paramour Ann Walker (Sophie Rundle), the stakes of their union are extremely high. Ann Walker, a wealthy and landed woman, risks losing the respect and support (though she never really had it to begin with) of her entire family. Anne Lister, an ambitious landowner, risks losing her business connections and the implicit political power she holds as a member of the elite class. 

These concerns were broadly discussed in Season 1 of the groundbreaking series, but Season 2 puts them front and center, forcing the audience to confront some difficult truths about Anne Lister’s strongly held political beliefs. Though creator Sally Wainwright has taken a significant risk in taking this studiously candid look at Lister’s often contradictory positions, the show is better for it. Noting the way Gentleman Jack brilliantly disrupts the dramatic form of the period piece, The Guardian’s Chitra Ramaswamy even goes so far as to call the series “a masterpiece.” 

At the end of Season 1, audiences saw Anne Lister and Ann Walker get (secretly) married in a church, professing their undying love for one another and knowing they could never truly share that love with the world. It was a truly stunning conclusion to the story, but the optimism of their audacious act doesn’t quite carry over into Season 2, at least not initially. The second season of the series sees Anne Lister and Ann Walker moving in together at Shibden Hall (Anne Lister’s home) and attempting to begin the process of writing each other into their respective wills. This seemingly simple act becomes much more complicated than expected, as Ann Walker’s meddling brother-in-law continuously blocks their efforts. And then there’s Anne Lister’s lofty entrepreneurial aspirations, dealings that worry her father and divert her attention away from Ann Walker. 

While these developments – some of which create conflict between Anne Lister and Ann Walker – can be upsetting to watch, one of the most distressing developments in Season 2 is the frank portrayal of Anne Lister’s politics. In a number of ways, Anne Lister becomes a very unlikable character in the second season. By the time half of the season has concluded, audiences have already seen Anne Lister cheat on Ann Walker with her ex, Mariana Lawton (Lydia Leonard), and in the season’s fifth episode, we’re presented with even more to dislike about her.

The episode, entitled “A Lucky and Narrow Escape,” primarily looks at the election of January 1835, following Anne Lister as she races around town, attending to business and ensuring that her party, the Tory party, secures a win. There is much turmoil among the working classes, which leads to rioting and property destruction in downtown Halifax. Anne Lister is furious about the damage done to the town, and worries the rioters might make their way up to Shibden. When a group of working-class people run up to Anne Lister and ask if she’s a blue or a yellow (a Tory or a Whig), she responds that she’s wearing black because she’s in mourning about all the damage that’s been done. It would have been a classic Lister comeback for audiences to cheer for were it not for the startling conservative politics she’s expressing. Have we been wrong about Anne Lister all along?

But perhaps this is not really the question that needs answering. It’s only right that we get to know the real Anne Lister, conservative political beliefs and all. Lister’s political and economic choices are made all the more relevant considering the current economic strife we're facing today. Gentleman Jack comes at a time when we’re finally beginning to realize (as if the working class didn’t already know) that landlords are not our benevolent overlords, but instead often act as human roadblocks to equity and economic enfranchisement. This fact may have been implicit in Season 1, but it becomes more difficult to ignore in Season 2. 

While the nature of Anne Lister’s political beliefs and personal feelings may seem contradictory on the surface, the two realities defined how she was able to live. As Sharmane Tan writes in her aptly-titled review of Episode 5, the choice to bring Anne Lister’s politics to the forefront “reminds us Lister’s conservatism in politics is precisely what gave her a semblance of freedom to pursue women.” While we were privileged enough to watch Anne Lister and Ann Walker’s love story in the first season, this rather rude awakening in Season 2 was a necessary reminder that their relative liberty was tied to the continued disenfranchisement of others. 

If the show’s first season is about the bravery it takes to open oneself up to love in treacherous circumstances, then the second season is about the things you must contend with when practicing such radical acceptance. This is true not only for Ann Walker, but for the audience as well. (Being that Anne Lister breaks the fourth wall in every episode, the audience could very well be considered its own character.) This hard shift must have been a tough sell for creator and writer Sally Wainwright, but it was the right, and the honest choice for the story. 

Gentleman Jack marks an interesting point in television history. In the 20th century, lesbians on screen and lesbians in literature were primarily predatory, seductive, and wholly immoral figures. More recently, lesbians and queer people on screen have become paragons of progress, so-called beacons of “positive” representation. In Gentleman Jack, neither paradigm rings true. 

Indeed, Gentleman Jack is not a theoretical experiment about representation nor an empty-headed exercise in lesbian storytelling – it is a serious project that tells the stories of real people, people who had opinions and made decisions that we may not agree with. It’s not as if Gentleman Jack is without humor or levity – that is certainly not the case – but it is clear that Wainwright's work is buoyed by an admirable process of intellectual rigor. It is this rigorous search for the truth, no matter how complicated or disheartening it may be, that makes Season 2 of Gentleman Jack so brilliant. 

Anne Lister’s eerily Thatcher-like politics will certainly give many fans of hers pause (as they should), but these aspects of her character do not negate the lessons we can learn from her story. Gentlemen Jack remains an invigorating story of lesbian survival and resistance, even as the more inspiriting contours of the narrative become less clearly defined. The fact that we have now been confronted with the less-than-admirable aspects of Lister’s character and are still compelled in some sense to root for her speaks not only to Wainright’s writing, but to Suranne Jones’ astounding performance as well.

This is the genius of Wainwright's work. In her refusal to smooth over the more disagreeable aspects of Anne Lister’s life, we have been gifted a fully-formed portrait of a woman who had just as much capacity within her for goodness as she did for implicit malevolence. It is not Wainwright's job to tell us what to do with these seemingly contradictory aspects of Anne Lister’s nature, but instead to give us the opportunity to wrestle with what these things mean for Lister’s legacy or how they might complicate our relationship to her. 

This struggle – to reconcile these disparate parts of Lister – is a productive one, I think. Asking audiences to confront Lister in her complicated fullness not only enlivens the story as it's told within the series, but also enriches our engagement with the text, much of which Lister wrote herself. For this abundance, even when it rankles us, we should be grateful. If the goal was to produce better, truer art, then Wainwright has certainly delivered.