This chapter considers how Anne Lister negotiated a place and identity for herself in (and beyond) Halifax society through her engagement in associational activity. This chapter positions Lister’s intellectual activity in the wider context of the opportunities for women’s participation in civic and intellectual life in this period, on a local and regional level, by considering her membership of more formal networks such as the York Friendly Society and the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, alongside informal ones of prominent local families. Lister’s status in her home town of Halifax was particular and unusual owing to the relatively open secret of her sexual nonconformity, as well as her propertied status as the owner of Shibden Hall. Building on the important work by Jill Liddington in Female Fortune (1998), which establishes Lister’s construction of a landed gentry identity that could compete with her fellow landowners, this chapter examines how far this exceptionality was able to carry her in evading the usual gendered constraints of intellectual life, and the ways in which she deployed traditionally patriarchal forms of power in accessing, promoting and disseminating civic projects such as the new ‘Lit and Phil’.