She had a reputation in York for being a predator for women.” She added: “The difference with Anne Lister was that people did know that she was very masculine, and they did know that she’d had relationships with women.
“Female companions lived together, and they would share the same bed, and no one would think anything of it, because, obviously, women didn’t have orgasms in those days,” Sally Wainwright, the show’s creator, said with jovial sarcasm in her own Yorkshire accent.