Helena Whitbread

Helena Whitbread is an English writer from Halifax, West Yorkshire. She is best known for the decryption and editing of the 19th-century Halifax lesbian landowner Anne Lister's secret coded diaries. She discovered the Lister diaries in the 1980s and spent five years decoding and transcribing the diaries working on 50 pages each weekend. She is the first researcher to publish the coded passages of the diaries of Anne Lister. The diaries consisted of 27 books, over six thousand pages and over four million words. The Anne Lister diaries that were decoded by Whitbread have won the recognition of The United Nations as a ‘pivotal’ document in British history and in 2011 they were added to the Memory of the World Register. The list is compiled by the UN Cultural Organization UNESCO and the archives are available online as historical UK documents.