Anne Lister was extremely uncommon.

The lives of middle- and upper-middle-class women of her time (1791-1840) typically revolved around marriage, treating their family as equivalent to a career. This was the flowering of the "Golden Age of Domesticity", a period where a woman's place was in the home and her glory was her ability to run that home smoothly and lovingly: to prepare the meals, educate the children, and provide a clean and wholesome retreat for the husband who went out into the world to come back to (or, in many cases, to hire and supervise the staff who did this while stepping in occasionally to handle a few points herself, which still counted). English society had held a public-men/private-women dichotomy for centuries - the medieval term "common woman", with common meaning something akin to "public", as in "held in common", meant a promiscuous one and perhaps a prostitute - but at this point in time, it went from being simply a fact of life to something wonderful and holy. A woman wasn't just biologically destined for motherhood and marriage, she was perfectly suited to it and would achieve her greatest pleasure from working in service of those states. By taking a role in business (collecting rents, sinking coal pits) and completely eschewing even the pretense of trying to get married and have children, Lister was violently flouting norms.

What would life have been like for another woman - a straight one, one who was simply conventional in general - born in 1791 to a gentleman and his wife? Like Lister, she would have first been educated at home, and then sent to a school in her early teens; at the Manor House School in York, she was taught "reading, writing and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, geography, history and heraldry," as well as drawing and playing the flute and the piano, and probably dancing. Lister's education then went on to include masculine subjects like algebra and Latin, but most women would not have gone this far, their languages restricted to modern ones like French, Italian, and German, which would have been useful for singing and for participating in high culture.

After school, this hypothetical, stereotypical person would have made her debut into local society, or "come out", marking her transition into being a young lady, eligible for marriage. While she'd be far from centering all her attention on it, finding a husband would be quite important to her - one who was of the appropriate social class, with a healthy income, and preferably some charms of his own. Her window would be relatively small, as once she passed 25 or so she would be unlikely to get married if she hadn't already, so it behooved her to ensure that she came off as beautiful, charming, and accomplished at social functions.

If she did get married, as I previously stated, her life would then center on her husband and her children; the latter would need to be nurtured, then educated, and eventually married off themselves. But let's say this ordinary woman didn't get married, in order to provide a better comparison with Lister. If, like Lister, she had a significant inheritance, it would have been managed for her by male relatives and she would have been able to live independently; she would likely have invited a poorer female relative to live with her or hired a paid companion. An independently wealthy single woman was extremely rare, however. A more ordinary woman of Anne Lister's class would have been forced to continue living with her parents, and once they were deceased, she would have moved in with a sibling, possibly as a lady-of-the-house for an unmarried brother, or as a hanger-on in the home of a married brother or sister. Women of the gentry did not live alone, and they did not support themselves through employment. For most of them, remaining unmarried was not a choice they would have made if they'd had any other option, because it meant a lonely, impoverished life of being considered a failure and lesser than their sisters, cousins, and comrades.

Gentleman Jack: A Biography of Anne Lister: Regency Landowner, Seducer & Secret Diarist, by Angela Steidele

"Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America, by Glenna Matthews