Born in
Pembrokeshire in
1966, Sarah Waters has emerged as one of the UK's most promising contemporary authors, and has chosen to abandon the career as an
English literature researcher which brought her the inspiration for her first three novels.
Waters'
PhD, as her press profiles unerringly recall, centred around
gay writing in the
Victorian period, and consigned her to long afternoons in the
British Library looking through
Victorian pornography.
Nice work if you can get it, I'm sure.
Such insalubrious study stood her in good stead when it came to writing her first novel
Tipping the Velvet, published in
1999.
TtV's heroine
Nan Astley begins as an
oyster girl in the
Kent seaside resort of
Whitstable (where Waters lived with her partner for six years), before falling for a
male impersonator by the name of
Kitty Butler who performs at the local
music hall.
Having followed Kitty to
London and become a
double act, how shall we say, on and off stage, Nan inconveniently discovers her in bed with her male manager and ends up in the clutches of
Diana Latheby, a dilettante with nothing better to do than peel girls off the street who have
fallen on hard times and introduce them to her remarkable collection of
sex toys. Waters was still teaching at
The Open University while writing this, so if you ever had a particularly distracted Eng Lit tutor there in the late '90s who looked rather like a blonde
Judi Dench, you now know why.
The next two novels,
Affinity (
2000) and
Fingersmith (
2002), managed the same cross between
Wilkie Collins and
Fanny Hill.
Spiritualism and
women's prisons are the stock-in-trade of
Affinity, while
Fingersmith trawls the
pickpocket haunts of London's
East End. (And if you have to ask what a fingersmith is, you're probably better off thinking pickpocket.)
All three give Waters the chance to show off her unparallelled ear for
Victorian slang, and suggest that even though she can't get more than a third of the way through her books without lapsing into the sort of thing she must have picked up in the British Library, Waters is probably at her best when her novels and her heroines are both finding their feet. (
Jeanette Winterson only with extra
petticoats.)
Waters' breakthrough year was
2002: shortlisted for the prestigious
Booker Prize (disarmingly, for Waters, renamed the Man Booker that year after a new sponsorship deal), she also saw
Tipping the Velvet adapted for television by the doyen of UK
period drama,
Andrew Davies, best known for his
Pride and Prejudice.
Starring
Diana Rigg's daughter
Rachael Stirling as Nan, and packed with suggestive shots of two women eating an
oyster at the same time, the three-parter came as close to
water cooler TV status as anything on
BBC2 is likely to manage, thanks to Davies' throwing in a
big leather dildo or such like whenever the going got tough.
Since Waters has announced her next novel will follow a lesbian couple in 1940s London, with nary a strap-on to be seen, readers looking for more of the same would be better advised to turn to
The Crimson Petal and the White,
Michel Faber's Victorian prostitute saga. If the
hanky panky starts to drag, it even has the advantage over Waters' three that it can always be pressed into service as a sturdy
doorstop.