Luckily for Wainwright, who was given the go-ahead to create an eight-episode first season, Lister had been preparing for her star turn all along. At the time of her death during an ill-fated trip to Russia in 1840, Lister had filled 27 volumes of notebooks, at 300 pages each, amounting to a total of 5 million words. About one fifth of the diaries are written in “crypthand,” a code made of numbers and Greek letters that Lister devised to describe her encounters with women — and there were many encounters.