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This talk will address the self-reckonings of Yorkshire diarist and lesbian polymath, Anne Lister (1791-1840). Lister has recently swept onto the global stage as a result of Sally Wainwright’s award-winning series, Gentleman Jack — itself based on the almost 5-million word journals she left behind. While Lister is often glossed as “the first modern lesbian,” that rubric raises as many historical problems as it resolves. This paper will ask about the affordances we moderns may have missed by taking Lister’s own preferred explanatory and justificatory term, oddity, as vague, euphemistic, or merely antiquated. Lister’s word choice manifests itself across decades of writing and appears freely across her two scripted “hands” (plain and encrypted). Exploring the intellectual premises of this term in the historical contexts of natural history and theology, we can consider Lister’s self-reckoning as an argument for singularity — for an “identity” with little relation to modern binaries and even without group membership.