Sarah Waters is one of the UK’s pre-eminent historical novelists: as a gay writer, she’s often engaged in ‘queering the canon’ – taking familiar stories and re-visiting them from a less hetero-normative perspective. Consequently, she seems an appropriate writer with whom to kick off our two weeks of Reading Queer.
Her first three novels are all set in the late Victorian era. There’s an enduring legend that lesbians slipped beneath the legal radar because Queen Victoria didn’t think sex without a man was possible, and her ministers were too coy to try to explain it to her. It’s pure urban myth, but it’s a fiction that survives, perhaps because it chimes with what we still (inaccurately) believe about Victorian prudery, as we imagine the Queen standing like a blinkered Britannia at the helm of a repressed and repressive nation.
Waters’s debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, suggests otherwise. It follows the life and adventures of Whitstable oyster-shucker, Nan Astley, whose love for music-hall male impersonator Kitty Butler leads her on a picaresque journey through the mean back streets and gilded drawing rooms of 1890s London. Steeped in street slang and period detail, Tipping the Velvet traces Nan’s gradual shift from innocence to experience, and in the process, shines a light into the less acknowledged corners of Victorian sexual behaviour.
Waters’s second novel, Affinity, is a much grimmer affair, a dark love story set against the shadowy backdrop of Victorian spiritualism. It has a clever twist, and more than you ever needed to know about séances, ectoplasm and Victorian prisons, but it never really catches fire (too much ectoplasm) and the protagonist lacks the sparkiness that makes Tipping the Velvet’s indomitable Nan such an engaging heroine.
Her third novel, Fingersmith, is Waters' masterpiece. Fusing Wilkie Collins’s sensational shocker The Woman in White with Dickens’s Great Expectations, it tells the story of a petty thief enlisted in a scam to defraud a fragile heiress of her money and incarcerate her in an asylum. But the con-girl unexpectedly finds herself falling for her victim – and that’s only the start (Waters’s novels are famous for their intricate plotting, which makes them difficult to discuss without spoilers).
Recently adapted as The Handmaiden by South Korean film-maker Park Chan-wook, who adds a few sensational flourishes (death by octopus definitely isn’t in the original novel), Fingersmith works brilliantly - not just as a gripping and twisty thriller, but also as a way of writing back into history lives and loves that have too often been erased or unrecorded.
After Fingersmith, Waters left the Victorians behind and started to re-work stories from the first half of the 20th century. The best of these (in my view) is The Little Stranger, the story of a country doctor who finds himself ensnared by the local gentry and their crumbling stately home. Partly a spin on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and part ‘state of the nation’ novel, The Little Stranger also revisits turn of the century ghost stories, where no one is quite the innocent they appear, and is often quite genuinely chilling. It also gives an interesting account of why not everyone thought the NHS was such a great idea.
The Night Watch charts the interweaving lives of men and women in London during the Blitz, with a complex back-and-forth narrative structure that gradually fits together like the fragments of a bomb-site. It has some genuinely gripping sections and remarkable characters, particularly its heroine Kay, an ambulance driver whose queer persona is accepted and tolerated during wartime but rejected once peacetime returns everything to 'normal'. The novel is weakened, however, by the love story at its heart, which falls a little flat because the central figure of the triangle is completely without personality and so it’s hard to understand why everyone’s so worked up about her.
Waters’s most recent novel, The Paying Guests, takes as its starting point a notorious murder case from the 1920s, and re-works it by making the pivotal figure in the love triangle gay rather than straight. This is a long, long novel – bleakly convincing in its evocation of the drab world of post WWI Britain, and the traumatised lives of those left behind after the war to end all wars.
Arguably, Waters’s 20th century historical novels are less compelling than her Victorian pastiches, which are more deviously plotted, both in terms of their action, their intersection with existing stories, and their tricksy games with narrative sleight of hand. Nevertheless, they are all eminently readable, and highly recommended. Several have been filmed for television - the BBC's serialisation of Tipping the Velvet is probably the best - although the complex plots often end up flattened out and stripped of the narrative voice that make them so absorbing on the page. If you had to read only one, I'd recommend Fingersmith - a novel that works as a thriller, as a love story and as a re-awakening of all those vanished voices that whisper from the corners of the nineteenth century library we think we know.
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