ELIZA RAINE: Lunatic, Heiress, and First Wife of Anne Lister. A Critical-Creative Biography

Carol Adlam

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Eliza Raine (1791–1860) was a British-Indian heiress and the first ‘wife’ of Anne Lister, the sexual trailblazer, prolific diarist, and explorer who was the subject of the recent smash-hit BBC tv series Gentleman Jack. Lister described Eliza as ‘the most beautiful girl I ever saw’. Eliza’s life began in the boomtown of East India Company Madras, where she and her sister Jane were born to a high-ranking English surgeon, William Raine, and an unknown Indian woman. Her life changed when she and her sister made the perilous sea journey from India to England to receive an education. There, at school in York, the young Eliza and Anne Lister fell in love. Together they created the code or ‘crypthand’ in which Anne would write a substantial portion of her 5-million words of diaries.

This creative memoir is the first to place Eliza Raine in its full historical context, grounding this pivotal figure in Anne Lister’s life in the complex worlds of British India, the fate of Anglo-Indian mixed-race children, the role of women in the early nineteenth century, and the turbulent emergence of the asylum system that changed nineteenth-century lives. It draws on new archival material to offer a fresh perspective on a woman who was both extraordinarily privileged, and extraordinarily lost, and whose courage and ability to forge her own identity will resonate with readers.

Eliza Raine is a hybrid book that breaks new ground by interleaving rigorously researched textual biography with sixteen imagined visual ‘tales’ in graphic novel format. Each of these tales picks up the story where the historical record falters, using sophisticated visual storytelling techniques to make absences, inconsistencies, and acts of discovery part of the narrative.

Novelist and playwright Emma Donoghue writes:

 ‘Until now, all of us interested in the unique figure of Eliza Raine - ‘bastard’, ‘lunatic’ and self-described ‘lady of colour’ - have been frustrated by the lack of any reliable account of her fascinating life; Adlam’s scrupulous biography, drawing on a plethora of new sources as well as the latest genealogical discoveries (especially by S J O’Riocáin), is exactly what’s needed.

 Adlam writes vividly about places and politics as well as people, making sense of the colonial, legal, financial and institutional realities that shaped Raine’s life. The fact that the book will also address gaps and enigmas through graphic novel sections (using gorgeously experimental art techniques) only makes Eliza Raine more interesting and appealing.

 What it has to say about race and class in the British empire could not be more urgent. Its creative/critical hybridity is sure to attract review/prize attention as well as attracting a variety of audiences to this fascinating woman’s (and family’s) story.’

Carol Adlam is a writer and visual artist. She specialises in graphic novels, scripts, short stories, graphic journalism, and creative non-fiction, and work that explores the intersections between art and literature, poetry, nonfiction, and music.

Forthcoming books include The Russian Detective, a graphic novel to be published by Jonathan Cape, and an art-poetry collaboration with emerging poet James Wade. Her graphic novel Thinking Room won the Association of Illustrators World Illustration Awards 2018 in the Professional Research and Knowledge Communication category (also shortlisted 2015, 2016).

A rich and varied career has seen her working as an academic, translator, and researcher, and has taken her from Melbourne, Australia, to Siberia and South Africa, and back again to the UK where she often collaborates with museums, galleries, universities, designers, and publishers. In 2021-22 she was a Visiting Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge, and in 2020 Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews. She has written and/or illustrated for The Guardian, the United Nations, the National Army Museum, Delayed Gratification: The Slow Journalism Magazine, and The National Archives, among others.

Further details at www.caroladlam.co.uk

Twitter @1badlamb