Sarah Waters

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Biography

Sarah Waters was born in 1966 in Pembrokeshire, Wales. She studied English Literature at the universities of Kent and Lancaster, after which she worked in bookshops and libraries, before returning to postgraduate study. She then gained a Ph.D in English Literature, her field of study being lesbian and gay historical fiction, and also had articles on gender, sexuality and history published in a number of journals.

While working on her Ph.D thesis, she became increasingly interested in London life of the nineteenth century, and began writing fiction. She has since written three novels set in Victorian England, for which she has received high praise from both mainstream reviewers and the gay and lesbian press.

In 1998, her first novel Tipping the Velvet was published - a picaresque adventure based around Victorian music hall, with a lesbian love story at its centre. This book was adapted into a drama serial by Andrew Davies, and received much press attention when it was shown on BBC TV in 2002. Her second novel, Affinity (1999), is a darker novel set in a London women's prison, and explores the Victorian world of spiritualism. This book won a Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction and a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2000, and was adapted for television in 2008. Fingersmith was published in 2002, a thriller and love story set among petty thieves and criminals in 1860s London. Its central character, Susan, is a pickpocket. This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Sarah Waters was for a time an associate lecturer for the Open University and has also tutored on Creative Writing programmes, but is now a full-time fiction writer living in London. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her novel The Night Watch (2006), is set in London during and after the Second World War. Her latest novel is The Little Stranger (2009), a ghost story. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction, Literary journalism

Bibliography

Tipping the Velvet   Virago, 1998

Affinity   Virago, 1999

Fingersmith   Virago, 2002

The Night Watch   Virago, 2006

The Little Stranger   Virago, 2009

Read about books by Sarah Waters at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Sarah Waters at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1999   Betty Trask Award   Tipping the Velvet

1999   Library Journal's Best Book of the Year   Tipping the Velvet

1999   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   Tipping the Velvet

1999   New York Times Notable Book of the Year   Tipping the Velvet

2000   American Library Association GLBT Roundtable Book Award   Affinity

2000   Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award   (shortlist)   Affinity

2000   Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction   (shortlist)   Tipping the Velvet

2000   Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction   Affinity

2000   Lambda Literary Award for Fiction   Tipping the Velvet

2000   Lambda Literary Award for Fiction   (shortlist)   Affinity

2000   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   (shortlist)   Affinity

2000   Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction   Affinity

2000   Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award   Affinity

2002   British Book Awards Author of the Year   Fingersmith

2002   Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger   Fingersmith

2002   Man Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Fingersmith

2002   Orange Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Fingersmith

2006   Man Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   The Night Watch

2006   Orange Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   The Night Watch

2007   British Book Awards Book of the Year   (shortlist)   The Night Watch

2007   James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction)   (shortlist)   The Night Watch

2009   Man Booker Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   The Little Stranger

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Critical Perspective

Sarah Waters is well on the way to becoming a household name. With three novels in four years, this born storyteller has achieved near-universal critical acclaim, and won herself a wide readership. Waters’ fiction, which has thus far recreated Victorian England with a Dickensian attention to detail, relies on intricate plots and a keen sense of atmospherics. Waters writes what she once described as 'lesbo Victorian romps.' In reality that description only really applies to her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), but it has of course had the effect of making her appealing to sensation-hungry newspaper readers. Reading Waters is a delicious pleasure; her narratives are superbly constructed and she has a control of suspense that would impress Hitchcock. She writes about entrapment, be that physical, psychological or sexual. In Tipping the Velvet, Nan King is trapped within her forbidden love for Kitty; in Affinity (1999), the spiritualist Selina Dawes is imprisoned; in Fingersmith (2002), Maud Lilly lives in an enforced servitude under the control of her Uncle, who employs her as a librarian to help him in his cataloguing of pornography.   

Waters was inspired to write her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, while working on her PhD thesis on lesbian historical fiction. During her research, which required her to read a lot of 19th-century pornography, she became drawn to 'telling stories that hadn’t been told.' The result was Tipping the Velvet, which is Victorian slang for cunnilingus. Waters sees the novel as a reclaiming or re-imagining of lesbian history. Set in 1890s London, the novel takes us into the world of the Victorian music halls, full of 'the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and tobacco and of hair oil.' It follows Nancy Astley, who, with a marked humility, takes us through her life, from her time working in her family’s oyster parlour in Whitley Bay, 'some quirk of the Kentish coastline makes Whistable natives – as they are properly called – the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the subtlest, oysters in the whole of England,' to her brief fame as a male impersonator when she becomes Nan King, to her fall onto hard times as a prostitute and rent-boy, and her subsequent country house secondment as the sex-toy of a Sapphic aristocrat. When she is forced out of this role, in one of the book’s most cruel moments, Nan has to once more reinvent herself, eventually falling in with a group of socialists. Nan is spirited and vital, lustful yet unsure of what to do with her own desires. She is a narrator we feel immediately in sympathy with, as she is without conceit, and it is her humble, this-is-just-the-life-I-lived delivery that keeps us gripped to her tale. Andrew Davies’ 2002 BBC adaptation of the novel has done much to bring it to wide public attention.

Waters’ second novel is a much darker affair than her first. Affinity, which won the novelist the Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, as well as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, relies much less on the sensational. It is a tale of love, quiet desire and the mysterious world of spiritualism. It is an understated and strangely unsettling tale of ghosts and self-discovery. Affinity takes place in the 1870s. Margaret Prior goes to London’s Millbank prison as a 'lady visitor', to listen to female prisoners, to provide, perhaps, a kind of comfort in a cold, fearful world of regulation and interminable greyness. Prior has her own problems, a nervous condition never explicitly dealt with, which causes her family to treat her patronisingly, with the constant fear that a collapse may be just around the corner. At Millbank one day Margaret hears 'a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story.' It belongs to Selina Dawes, a medium imprisoned for fraud and assault. As the relationship develops, as an affinity between them grows, odd, seemingly supernatural things begin to happen: flowers suddenly appear and a much-loved locket disappears from Margaret’s room. The narrative is split between Margaret’s diary, where we learn that she was once in love with a woman who is now her sister-in-law, and Selina’s chronicle of her time before imprisonment. As the novel nears its conclusion we find ourselves turning over the pages with greater alacrity, desperate to discover the outcome of Margaret and Selina’s plan to free the spiritualist and come together as lovers. We are shocked to discover the truth. The layers of stifling claustrophobia and repression that Waters steadily builds throughout the novel are suddenly peeled away, and what we are left with is a sadness and despondency. The finalé, downbeat and hard-edged, in which several strands of the plot are tied together, resonates long after the last page is read.

Fingersmith, Waters’ Man Booker Prize nominated third novel, draws on the tradition of Victorian sensation fiction. Set in a Fagin-like den of thieves in 1860s London, Fingersmith is a gothic melodrama, a tale of betrayal and double-dealing, of constant greed and emotional abuse. Susan Trinder is a pickpocket, or 'fingersmith' in Victorian slang. She is persuaded by Gentleman, a criminal accomplice, to pose as a lady’s maid to Maud Lilly, a young heiress. Gentleman needs Sue to help him with his elaborate plot to rid Maud of her large inheritance. So Sue goes to Briar, where we find the poor Maud Lilly, a victim of her tyrannical uncle, a bookish man who collects pornography. Gentleman himself takes up residence at Briar, posing as an assistant to Maud’s uncle. Gentleman’s aim is to trick Maud into marriage, the first stage in his devilish plan to steal her fortune. Halfway through Fingersmith there is a major twist, which is borrowed, by Waters’ admission, from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. After the novel is turned on its head there follows a series of unbelievably complex plot twists. Yet the labyrinthine plot is the point. This is a paen to a type of fiction which employed just such devices; the pleasure of reading it is in being able to follow the narrative down the most unexpected of roads.
 
Somehow Waters avoids pastiche. Unlike John Fowles, whose intention with The French Lieutenant’s Women was to mimic and parody the tropes and conventions of Victorian fiction, Waters’ chief concern is not to call into question the notion of the omniscience of narrators, or foreground the artificiality of fiction; instead, she aims at faithful recreation. She may push very close to the boundary of caricature, particularly with Fingersmith, but she aims to capture the feel and style of Victorian fiction; she does this so successfully that we often forget we are reading a modern novel.

Garan Holcombe, 2005

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Further reading on this site

Edinburgh Bookcase
The British Council Literature Department and British Council Scotland showcase contemporary writers at the Edinburgh International Book Festival every two years, in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council. The Bookcase... more...   (09/06/2004)

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Virago Time Warner Book Group Brettenham House, Lancaster Place London  WC2E 7EN England Tel: +44 (0) 20 7911 8000 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7911 8100 E-mail: virago.press@timewarnerbooks.co.uk www.virago.co.uk

Agent Greene & Heaton Ltd 37 Goldhawk Road London  W12 8QQ England Tel: +44 (0)20 8749 0315 Fax: +44 (0)20 8749 0318 E-mail: info@greeneheaton.co.uk http://www.greeneheaton.co.uk

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