Sarah Waters
...on the art of her self-declared "lesbo Victorian romps"...
Surely Sarah Waters' most famous work is her 1998 Victorian lesbian novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), which, having topped the bestseller charts, gained an even greater audience following its adaptation into a three-part TV serial in 2002.She has also written two other novels set in the same period: Affinity, which is centred on the world of Victorian spiritualism and won the Stonewall Book Award and Somerset Maugham Award, and Fingersmith, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. As with Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith was also made into a TV series for the BBC.
Waters has various degrees in English Literature, including a PhD. Her work for her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction inspired Tipping the Velvet.Waters' popularity in England became evident in 2005 when she received the highest bid during an auction where a real person's name would be immortalized in one of her novels. The auction featured many notable British novelists, and the bidder, Marina Carr, had a modified version of her name featured in Waters' latest novel The Night Watch.This book traces history back through 1940s London, following three lesbian women, one straight woman and one gay man, and the secrets, shames and scandals that connect them all, despite their different experiences. It was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and long-listed for the 2006 Orange Prize.
Here, Waters discusses the success of her previous books ("There's a kind of kinkiness to the institutions of Victorian life") and expands on why The Night Watch was something of a departure for her, both in terms of the historical period in which it is set, and for the way in which she approached it.
The Night Watch is priced £7.99, and is available from all good bookshops now.
