It was a rainy day in 1990 when novelist Emma Donoghue, then a 20-year-old student at Cambridge, ducked into a bookshop to seek shelter. Browsing the shelves, she came across a book entitled I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister. If today Donaghue is considered something of a Lister expert—her just-released novel, Learned by Heart, is a fictionalization of Lister’s early years (more on that later)—this moment could serve as her origin story.