The Life of Lesbian Portrayed in Sarah Waters Novel Fingersmith
APPENDICES
Author’s Biography
SARAH WATERS
Chilhood
Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966.She grew up
in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a sister. Her mother was a
housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her
family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her father, "a fantastically creative
person", encouraged her to build and invent.
Waters said, "When I picture myself as a child, I see myself constructing
something, out of plasticine or papier-mâché or Meccano; I used to enjoy writing poems
and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic
pastiches", but had not planned her career. Despite her obvious enjoyment of writing,
she did not feel any special calling or preference for becoming a novelist in her youth.
“
I don’t know if I thought about it much, really. I know that, for a long time, I
wanted to be an archaeologist – like lots of kids. And I think I knew I was
headed for university, even though no one else in my family had been. I really
enjoyed learning. I remember my mother telling me that I might one day go to
university and write a thesis, and explaining what a thesis was; and it seemed a
very exciting prospect. I was clearly a bit of a nerd.
”
Education
After Milford Haven Grammar School, Waters attended university and earned degrees in
English literature. She received a BA from the University of Kent, an MA from
Lancaster University, and a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD
thesis, entitled Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the
present, served as inspiration and material for future books. As part of her research she
read 19th-century pornography, in which she came across the title of her first book,
Tipping the Velvet. However, her literary influences are also found in the popular
classics of Victorian literature, such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and the Brontës,
and in the contemporary novelists that combine a keen interest in Victoriana with a postmodernist approach to fiction, especially A.S. Byatt and John Fowles. Angela Carter's
'Nights at the Circus' had a huge influence on her début novel as well, and Waters
praises her for her literary prose, her "common touch", and her commitment to
feminism.
Daily life
Waters lives in a top-floor Victorian flat in Kennington, south-east London.
Career
Before writing novels, Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching.
Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process
of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the
thesis was complete. Her work is very research-intensive, which is an aspect she enjoys.
Waters was briefly a member of the long-running London North Writers circle, whose
members have included the novelists Charles Palliser and Neil Blackmore, among
others.
With the exception of The Little Stranger, all of her books contain lesbian themes, and
she does not mind being labelled a lesbian writer. She said, "I'm writing with a clear
lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books." Despite this
"common agenda in teasing out lesbian stories from parts of history that are regarded as
quite heterosexual", she also calls her lesbian protagonists "incidental", due to her own
sexual orientation. "That's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most
lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life."
Tipping the Velvet (1998)
Her debut work was the VictorianpicaresqueTipping the Velvet, published by Virago in
1998. The novel took 18 months to write. The book takes its title from Victorian slang
for cunnilingus. Waters describes the novel as a "very upbeat [...] kind of a romp".
It won a 1999 Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
In 2002, the novel was adapted into a three-part television serial of the same name for
BBC Two. It has been translated into at least 24 languages, including Chinese, Latvian,
Hungarian, Korean and Slovenian.
Affinity (1999)
Waters's second book, Affinity was published a year after her first, in 1999. The novel,
also set in the Victorian era, centres on the world of Victorian Spiritualism. While
finishing her debut novel, Waters had been working on an academic paper on
spiritualism. She combined her interests in spiritualism, prisons, and the Victorian era in
Affinity, which tells the story of the relationship between an upper middle-class woman
and an imprisoned spiritualist.
The novel is less light-hearted than the ones that preceded and followed it. Waters found
it less enjoyable to write. "It was a very gloomy world to have to go into every day", she
said.
Affinity won the Stonewall Book Award and Somerset Maugham Award. Andrew
Davies wrote a screenplay adapting Affinity and the resulting feature film premiered 19
June 2008 at the opening night of Frameline the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival at
the Castro Theater.
Fingersmith (2002)
Fingersmith was published in 2002. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the
Orange Prize.
Fingersmith was made into a serial for BBC One in 2005, starring Sally Hawkins, Elaine
Cassidy and Imelda Staunton. Waters approved of the adaptation, calling it "a really
good quality show", and said it was "very faithful to the book. It was spookily faithful to
the book at times, which was exciting."
The Night Watch (2006)
Main article: The Night Watch (Waters novel)
The Night Watch took four years for Waters to write. It differs from the first three novels
in its time period and its structure. Although her thesis and previous books focused on
the 19th century, Waters said that "Something about the 1940s called to me".It was also
less tightly plotted than her other books. Waters said,
“
I had more or less to figure the book out as I went along – a very timeconsuming and unnerving experience for me, as I tried out scenes and chapters
in lots of different ways. I ended up with a pile of rejected scenes about three
feet high. It was satisfying in the end, realizing just what should go where; but a
lot of the time it felt like a wrestling match.
”
The novel tells the stories of a man and three women in 1940s London. Waters describes
it as "fundamentally a novel about disappointment and loss and betrayal", as well as
"real contact between people and genuine intimacy".
In 2005, Waters received the highest bid (£1,000) during a charity auction in which the
prize was the opportunity to have the winner's name immortalised in The Night Watch.
The auction featured many notable British novelists, and the name of the bidder, author
Martina Cole, appeared in Waters' novel.
The Night Watch was adapted for television by BBC2 and broadcast on 12 July 2011.
The Little Stranger (2009)
Also set in the 1940s, The Little Stranger also differs from Waters' previous novels. It is
her first with no overtly lesbian characters. Initially, Waters set out to write a book about
the economic changes brought by socialism in postwar Britain, and reviewers note the
connection with Evelyn Waugh. During the novel's construction, it turned into a ghost
story, focusing on a family of gentry who own a large country house they can no longer
afford to maintain.
The Paying Guests (2014)
This novel is set in the 1920s, in the social and economic aftermath of World War I.
Households are in reduced circumstances and Frances Wray and her mother have to take
in lodgers to keep going. The developing lesbian relationship between Frances and
lodger Lilian Barber provides a complex backdrop for a murder investigation that takes
up the latter half of the book. The Observer said: "The inimitable Sarah Waters handles a
dramatic key change with aplomb in her new novel set in 1920s south London". The
Telegraph described it as "eerie, virtuoso writing".
Academic work
•
•
•
Waters, S. (1994). "'A Girton Girl on a Throne': Queen Christina and Versions of
Lesbianism, 1906-1933". Feminist Review (46): 41–60. doi:10.2307/1395418.
Waters, S. (1995). ""The Most Famous Fairy in History": Antinous and
Homosexual Fantasy". Journal of the History of Sexuality6 (2): 194–230.
doi:10.2307/3704122.
Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present
(PhD thesis), Queen Mary, University of London, 1995
Adaptations
Television
•
•
•
•
Tipping the Velvet (2002), BBC
Two
Fingersmith (2005), BBC One
Affinity (2008), ITV1
The Night Watch (2011), BBC Two
•
Tipping the Velvet (2015)
Awards
Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Writers in January
2003. The same year, she received the South Bank Award for Literature. She was named
Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards.[6] In both 2006 and 2009 she won
"Writer of the Year" at the annual Stonewall Awards. She was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
Each of her novels has received awards as well.
Tipping the Velvet
•
•
•
Betty Trask Award, 1999
Library Journal's Best Book of the Year, 1999
Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, 1999
•
•
•
New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, 1999
Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction (shortlist), 2000
Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, 2000
Affinity
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Stonewall Book Award (American Library Association GLBT Roundtable Book
Award), 2000
Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award (shortlist), 2000
Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, 2000
Lambda Literary Award for Fiction (shortlist), 2000
Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist), 2000
Somerset Maugham Award, 2000
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, 2000
The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery gaSugoi!
2004
Fingersmith
•
•
•
•
•
British Book Awards Author of the Year, 2002
Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, 2002
Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2002
Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2002
The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery gaSugoi!
2005
The Night Watch
•
•
•
Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
Lambda Literary Award, 2007
The Little Stranger
•
•
Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2009
Nominee for Shirley Jackson Award, 2009
The Paying Guests
•
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (shortlist) 2015
Summary of Fingersmith’s novel by Sarah Waters
Part One
Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in 'a Fagin-like den of thieves' by her adoptive
mother, Mrs. Sucksby, is sent to help Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers seduce a wealthy
heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to gain the trust of the lady, Maud Lilly, and eventually
persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married, Gentleman plans to
commit Maud to a madhouse and claim her fortune for himself.
Sue travels to Briar, Maud's secluded home in the country, where she lives a
sheltered life under the care of her uncle, Christopher Lilly. Like Sue, Maud was
orphaned at birth; her mother died in a mental asylum, and she has never known her
father. Her uncle uses her as a secretary to assist him in compiling an Index of Erotica,
and keeps her to the house, working with him in the silence of his library.
Sue and Maud forge an unlikely friendship, which develops into a mutual
physical passion; after a time, Sue realizes she has fallen in love with Maud, and begins
to regret her involvement in Gentleman's plot. Deeply distressed, but feeling she has no
choice, Sue persuades Maud to marry Gentleman, and the trio flee from Briar to a
nearby church, where Maud and Gentleman are hastily married in a midnight ceremony.
Making a temporary home in a local cottage, and telling Maud they are simply
waiting for their affairs to be brought to order in London, Gentleman and a reluctant Sue
make arrangements for Maud to be committed to an asylum for the insane; her health
has already waned as a result of the shock of leaving her quiet life at Briar, to
Gentleman's delight.
After a week, he and Sue escort an oblivious Maud to the asylum in a closed
carriage. However, the doctors apprehend Sue on arrival, and from the cold reactions of
Gentleman and the seemingly innocent Maud, Sue guesses that it is she who has been
conned: "That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start."
Part Two
In the second part of the novel, Maud takes over the narrative. She describes her
early life being raised by the nurses in the mental asylum where her mother died, and the
sudden appearance of her uncle, who arrives when she is eleven to take her to Briar to be
his secretary.
Her induction into his rigid way of life is brutal; Maud is made to wear gloves
constantly to preserve the surfaces of the books she is working on, and is denied food
when she tires of labouring with her uncle in his library. Distressed, and missing her
previous home, Maud begins to demonstrate sadistic tendencies, biting and kicking her
maid, Agnes, and her abusive carer, Mrs Stiles. She harbours a deep resentment toward
her mother for abandoning her, and starts holding her mother's locket every night, and
whispering to it how much she hates her.
Shockingly, Maud reveals that her uncle's work is not to compile a dictionary,
but to assemble a bibliography of literary pornography, for the reference of future
generations. In his own words, Christopher Lilly is a 'curator of poisons.' He introduces
Maud to the keeping of the books—indexing them and such—when she is barely twelve,
and deadens her reactions to the shocking material. As she grows older, Maud reads the
material aloud for the appreciation of her uncle's colleagues. On one occasion, when
asked by one of them how she can stand to curate such things, Maud answers, "I was
bred to the task, as servants are."
She has resigned herself to a life serving her uncle's obscure ambition when Richard
Rivers arrives at Briar. He reveals to her a plan to help her escape her exile in Briar, a
plan involving the deception of a commonplace girl who will believe she has been sent
to Briar to trick Maud out of her inheritance. After initial hesitation, Maud agrees to the
plan and receives Sue weeks later, pretending to know nothing about the plot.
Maud falls in love with Sue over time and, like Sue, begins to question whether
she will be able to carry out Gentleman's plot as planned. Though overcome with guilt,
Maud does, and travels with Gentleman to London after committing Sue to the asylum,
claiming to the doctors that Sue was the mad Mrs Maud Rivers who believed she was a
commonplace girl.
Instead of taking Maud to a house in Chelsea, as he had promised, Gentleman
takes her to Mrs. Sucksby in the Borough. It was, it turns out, Gentleman's plan to bring
her here all along; and, Mrs. Sucksby, who had orchestrated the entire plan, reveals to a
stunned Maud that a lady, Marianne Lilly, had come to Lant Street seventeen years
earlier, pregnant and alone. When Marianne discovered her cruel father and brother had
found her, she begged Mrs. Sucksby to take her newborn child and give her one of her
'farmed' infants to take its place.
Sue, it turns out, was Marianne Lilly's true daughter, and Maud one of the many
orphaned infants who had been placed on Mrs. Sucksby's care after being abandoned.
Marianne revises her will on the night of the switch, entitling each of the two girls to
half of Marianne Lilly's fortune. By having Sue committed, Mrs. Sucksby could
intercept one share; by keeping Maud a prisoner, she could take the other half. She had
planned the switch of the two girls for seventeen years, and enlisted the help of
Gentleman to bring Maud to her in the weeks before Sue's eighteenth birthday, when she
would become legally entitled to the money. By setting Sue up as the 'mad Mrs. Rivers',
Gentleman could, by law, claim her fortune for himself.
Alone and friendless, Maud has no choice but to remain a prisoner at Lant Street.
She makes one attempt to escape to the home of one of her uncle's friends, Mr. Hawtrey,
but he turns her away, appalled at the scandal that she has fallen into, and anxious to
preserve his own reputation. Maud returns to Lant Street and finally submits to the care
of Mrs. Sucksby. It is then that Mrs. Sucksby reveals to her that Maud was not an orphan
that she took into her care, as she and Gentleman had told her, but Mrs. Sucksby's own
daughter.
Part three
The novel resumes Sue's narrative, picking up where Maud and Gentleman had
left her in the mental asylum. Sue is devastated at Maud's betrayal and furious that
Gentleman double-crossed her. When she screams to the asylum doctors that she is not
Mrs. Rivers but her maid Susan, they ignore her, as Gentleman (helped by Maud) has
convinced them that this is precisely her delusion, and that she is really Maud Lilly
Rivers, his troubled wife.
Sue is treated appallingly by the nurses in the asylum, being subjected to
beatings and taunts on a regular basis. Such is her maltreatment and loneliness that, after
a time, she begins to fear that she truly has gone mad. She is sustained by the belief that
Mrs. Sucksby will find and rescue her. Sue dwells on Maud's betrayal, the devastation of
which quickly turns to anger.
Sue's chance at freedom comes when Charles, a knife boy from Briar, comes to
visit her. He is the nephew, it turns out, of the local woman (Mrs Cream) who owned the
cottage the trio had stayed in on the night of Maud and Gentleman's wedding. Charles, a
simple boy, had been pining for the charming attentions of Gentleman to such an extent
that Mr Way, the warden of Briar, had begun to beat him severely. Charles ran away,
and had been directed to the asylum by Mrs Cream, who had no idea of the nature of the
place.
Sue quickly enlists his help in her escape, persuading him to purchase a blank
key and a file to give to her on his next visit. This he does, and Sue, using the skills
learnt growing up in the Borough, escapes from the asylum and travels with Charles to
London, with the intention of returning to Mrs. Sucksby and her home in Lant Street.
On arrival, an astonished Sue sees Maud at her bedroom window. After days of
watching the activity of her old home from a nearby boarding house, Sue sends Charles
with a letter explaining all to Mrs. Sucksby, still believing that it was Maud and
Gentleman alone who deceived her. Charles returns, saying Maud intercepted the letter,
and sends Sue a playing card—the Two of Hearts, representing lovers—in reply. Sue
takes the token as a joke, and storms into the house to confront Maud, half-mad with
rage. She tells everything to Mrs. Sucksby, who pretends to have known nothing, and
despite Mrs. Sucksby's repeated attempts to calm her, swears she will kill Maud for what
she has done to her. Gentleman arrives, and though initially shocked at Sue's escape,
laughingly begins to tell Sue how Mrs. Sucksby played her for a fool. Maud physically
tries to stop him, knowing how the truth would devastate Sue; a scuffle between Maud,
Gentleman and Mrs. Sucksby ensues, and in the confusion, Gentleman is stabbed by the
knife Sue had taken up to kill Maud, minutes earlier. He bleeds to death. A hysterical
Charles alerts the police. Mrs. Sucksby, at last sorry for how she has deceived the two
girls, immediately confesses to the murder: "Lord knows, I'm sorry for it now; but I done
it. And these girls here are innocent girls, and know nothing at all about it; and have
harmed no-one."
Mrs. Sucksby who is ‘a baby day care’ is hanged for killing Gentleman; it is
revealed that Richard Rivers was not a shamed gentleman at all, but a draper's son
named Frederick Bunt, who had had ideas above his station. Maud disappears, though
Sue sees her briefly at Mrs. Sucksby's trial and gathers from the prison matrons that
Maud had been visiting Mrs. Sucksby in the days leading up to her death. Sue remains
unaware of her true parentage, until she finds the will of Marianne Lilly tucked in the
folds of Mrs. Sucksby's gown. Realizing everything, an overwhelmed Sue sets out to
find Maud, beginning by returning to Briar. It is there she finds Maud, and the nature of
Christopher Lilly's work is finally revealed to Sue. It is further revealed that Maud is
now writing erotic fiction to sustain herself financially, publishing her stories in The
Pearl, a pornographic magazine run by one of her uncle's friends in London, William
Lazenby. The two girls, still very much in love with each other despite everything, make
peace and give vent to their feelings at last then they declare their relationship to all
those their servants at Briar.
Author’s Biography
SARAH WATERS
Chilhood
Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966.She grew up
in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a sister. Her mother was a
housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her
family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her father, "a fantastically creative
person", encouraged her to build and invent.
Waters said, "When I picture myself as a child, I see myself constructing
something, out of plasticine or papier-mâché or Meccano; I used to enjoy writing poems
and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic
pastiches", but had not planned her career. Despite her obvious enjoyment of writing,
she did not feel any special calling or preference for becoming a novelist in her youth.
“
I don’t know if I thought about it much, really. I know that, for a long time, I
wanted to be an archaeologist – like lots of kids. And I think I knew I was
headed for university, even though no one else in my family had been. I really
enjoyed learning. I remember my mother telling me that I might one day go to
university and write a thesis, and explaining what a thesis was; and it seemed a
very exciting prospect. I was clearly a bit of a nerd.
”
Education
After Milford Haven Grammar School, Waters attended university and earned degrees in
English literature. She received a BA from the University of Kent, an MA from
Lancaster University, and a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD
thesis, entitled Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the
present, served as inspiration and material for future books. As part of her research she
read 19th-century pornography, in which she came across the title of her first book,
Tipping the Velvet. However, her literary influences are also found in the popular
classics of Victorian literature, such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and the Brontës,
and in the contemporary novelists that combine a keen interest in Victoriana with a postmodernist approach to fiction, especially A.S. Byatt and John Fowles. Angela Carter's
'Nights at the Circus' had a huge influence on her début novel as well, and Waters
praises her for her literary prose, her "common touch", and her commitment to
feminism.
Daily life
Waters lives in a top-floor Victorian flat in Kennington, south-east London.
Career
Before writing novels, Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching.
Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process
of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the
thesis was complete. Her work is very research-intensive, which is an aspect she enjoys.
Waters was briefly a member of the long-running London North Writers circle, whose
members have included the novelists Charles Palliser and Neil Blackmore, among
others.
With the exception of The Little Stranger, all of her books contain lesbian themes, and
she does not mind being labelled a lesbian writer. She said, "I'm writing with a clear
lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books." Despite this
"common agenda in teasing out lesbian stories from parts of history that are regarded as
quite heterosexual", she also calls her lesbian protagonists "incidental", due to her own
sexual orientation. "That's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most
lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life."
Tipping the Velvet (1998)
Her debut work was the VictorianpicaresqueTipping the Velvet, published by Virago in
1998. The novel took 18 months to write. The book takes its title from Victorian slang
for cunnilingus. Waters describes the novel as a "very upbeat [...] kind of a romp".
It won a 1999 Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
In 2002, the novel was adapted into a three-part television serial of the same name for
BBC Two. It has been translated into at least 24 languages, including Chinese, Latvian,
Hungarian, Korean and Slovenian.
Affinity (1999)
Waters's second book, Affinity was published a year after her first, in 1999. The novel,
also set in the Victorian era, centres on the world of Victorian Spiritualism. While
finishing her debut novel, Waters had been working on an academic paper on
spiritualism. She combined her interests in spiritualism, prisons, and the Victorian era in
Affinity, which tells the story of the relationship between an upper middle-class woman
and an imprisoned spiritualist.
The novel is less light-hearted than the ones that preceded and followed it. Waters found
it less enjoyable to write. "It was a very gloomy world to have to go into every day", she
said.
Affinity won the Stonewall Book Award and Somerset Maugham Award. Andrew
Davies wrote a screenplay adapting Affinity and the resulting feature film premiered 19
June 2008 at the opening night of Frameline the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival at
the Castro Theater.
Fingersmith (2002)
Fingersmith was published in 2002. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the
Orange Prize.
Fingersmith was made into a serial for BBC One in 2005, starring Sally Hawkins, Elaine
Cassidy and Imelda Staunton. Waters approved of the adaptation, calling it "a really
good quality show", and said it was "very faithful to the book. It was spookily faithful to
the book at times, which was exciting."
The Night Watch (2006)
Main article: The Night Watch (Waters novel)
The Night Watch took four years for Waters to write. It differs from the first three novels
in its time period and its structure. Although her thesis and previous books focused on
the 19th century, Waters said that "Something about the 1940s called to me".It was also
less tightly plotted than her other books. Waters said,
“
I had more or less to figure the book out as I went along – a very timeconsuming and unnerving experience for me, as I tried out scenes and chapters
in lots of different ways. I ended up with a pile of rejected scenes about three
feet high. It was satisfying in the end, realizing just what should go where; but a
lot of the time it felt like a wrestling match.
”
The novel tells the stories of a man and three women in 1940s London. Waters describes
it as "fundamentally a novel about disappointment and loss and betrayal", as well as
"real contact between people and genuine intimacy".
In 2005, Waters received the highest bid (£1,000) during a charity auction in which the
prize was the opportunity to have the winner's name immortalised in The Night Watch.
The auction featured many notable British novelists, and the name of the bidder, author
Martina Cole, appeared in Waters' novel.
The Night Watch was adapted for television by BBC2 and broadcast on 12 July 2011.
The Little Stranger (2009)
Also set in the 1940s, The Little Stranger also differs from Waters' previous novels. It is
her first with no overtly lesbian characters. Initially, Waters set out to write a book about
the economic changes brought by socialism in postwar Britain, and reviewers note the
connection with Evelyn Waugh. During the novel's construction, it turned into a ghost
story, focusing on a family of gentry who own a large country house they can no longer
afford to maintain.
The Paying Guests (2014)
This novel is set in the 1920s, in the social and economic aftermath of World War I.
Households are in reduced circumstances and Frances Wray and her mother have to take
in lodgers to keep going. The developing lesbian relationship between Frances and
lodger Lilian Barber provides a complex backdrop for a murder investigation that takes
up the latter half of the book. The Observer said: "The inimitable Sarah Waters handles a
dramatic key change with aplomb in her new novel set in 1920s south London". The
Telegraph described it as "eerie, virtuoso writing".
Academic work
•
•
•
Waters, S. (1994). "'A Girton Girl on a Throne': Queen Christina and Versions of
Lesbianism, 1906-1933". Feminist Review (46): 41–60. doi:10.2307/1395418.
Waters, S. (1995). ""The Most Famous Fairy in History": Antinous and
Homosexual Fantasy". Journal of the History of Sexuality6 (2): 194–230.
doi:10.2307/3704122.
Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present
(PhD thesis), Queen Mary, University of London, 1995
Adaptations
Television
•
•
•
•
Tipping the Velvet (2002), BBC
Two
Fingersmith (2005), BBC One
Affinity (2008), ITV1
The Night Watch (2011), BBC Two
•
Tipping the Velvet (2015)
Awards
Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Writers in January
2003. The same year, she received the South Bank Award for Literature. She was named
Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards.[6] In both 2006 and 2009 she won
"Writer of the Year" at the annual Stonewall Awards. She was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
Each of her novels has received awards as well.
Tipping the Velvet
•
•
•
Betty Trask Award, 1999
Library Journal's Best Book of the Year, 1999
Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, 1999
•
•
•
New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, 1999
Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction (shortlist), 2000
Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, 2000
Affinity
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Stonewall Book Award (American Library Association GLBT Roundtable Book
Award), 2000
Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award (shortlist), 2000
Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, 2000
Lambda Literary Award for Fiction (shortlist), 2000
Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist), 2000
Somerset Maugham Award, 2000
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, 2000
The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery gaSugoi!
2004
Fingersmith
•
•
•
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British Book Awards Author of the Year, 2002
Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, 2002
Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2002
Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2002
The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery gaSugoi!
2005
The Night Watch
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Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
Lambda Literary Award, 2007
The Little Stranger
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Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2009
Nominee for Shirley Jackson Award, 2009
The Paying Guests
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Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (shortlist) 2015
Summary of Fingersmith’s novel by Sarah Waters
Part One
Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in 'a Fagin-like den of thieves' by her adoptive
mother, Mrs. Sucksby, is sent to help Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers seduce a wealthy
heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to gain the trust of the lady, Maud Lilly, and eventually
persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married, Gentleman plans to
commit Maud to a madhouse and claim her fortune for himself.
Sue travels to Briar, Maud's secluded home in the country, where she lives a
sheltered life under the care of her uncle, Christopher Lilly. Like Sue, Maud was
orphaned at birth; her mother died in a mental asylum, and she has never known her
father. Her uncle uses her as a secretary to assist him in compiling an Index of Erotica,
and keeps her to the house, working with him in the silence of his library.
Sue and Maud forge an unlikely friendship, which develops into a mutual
physical passion; after a time, Sue realizes she has fallen in love with Maud, and begins
to regret her involvement in Gentleman's plot. Deeply distressed, but feeling she has no
choice, Sue persuades Maud to marry Gentleman, and the trio flee from Briar to a
nearby church, where Maud and Gentleman are hastily married in a midnight ceremony.
Making a temporary home in a local cottage, and telling Maud they are simply
waiting for their affairs to be brought to order in London, Gentleman and a reluctant Sue
make arrangements for Maud to be committed to an asylum for the insane; her health
has already waned as a result of the shock of leaving her quiet life at Briar, to
Gentleman's delight.
After a week, he and Sue escort an oblivious Maud to the asylum in a closed
carriage. However, the doctors apprehend Sue on arrival, and from the cold reactions of
Gentleman and the seemingly innocent Maud, Sue guesses that it is she who has been
conned: "That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start."
Part Two
In the second part of the novel, Maud takes over the narrative. She describes her
early life being raised by the nurses in the mental asylum where her mother died, and the
sudden appearance of her uncle, who arrives when she is eleven to take her to Briar to be
his secretary.
Her induction into his rigid way of life is brutal; Maud is made to wear gloves
constantly to preserve the surfaces of the books she is working on, and is denied food
when she tires of labouring with her uncle in his library. Distressed, and missing her
previous home, Maud begins to demonstrate sadistic tendencies, biting and kicking her
maid, Agnes, and her abusive carer, Mrs Stiles. She harbours a deep resentment toward
her mother for abandoning her, and starts holding her mother's locket every night, and
whispering to it how much she hates her.
Shockingly, Maud reveals that her uncle's work is not to compile a dictionary,
but to assemble a bibliography of literary pornography, for the reference of future
generations. In his own words, Christopher Lilly is a 'curator of poisons.' He introduces
Maud to the keeping of the books—indexing them and such—when she is barely twelve,
and deadens her reactions to the shocking material. As she grows older, Maud reads the
material aloud for the appreciation of her uncle's colleagues. On one occasion, when
asked by one of them how she can stand to curate such things, Maud answers, "I was
bred to the task, as servants are."
She has resigned herself to a life serving her uncle's obscure ambition when Richard
Rivers arrives at Briar. He reveals to her a plan to help her escape her exile in Briar, a
plan involving the deception of a commonplace girl who will believe she has been sent
to Briar to trick Maud out of her inheritance. After initial hesitation, Maud agrees to the
plan and receives Sue weeks later, pretending to know nothing about the plot.
Maud falls in love with Sue over time and, like Sue, begins to question whether
she will be able to carry out Gentleman's plot as planned. Though overcome with guilt,
Maud does, and travels with Gentleman to London after committing Sue to the asylum,
claiming to the doctors that Sue was the mad Mrs Maud Rivers who believed she was a
commonplace girl.
Instead of taking Maud to a house in Chelsea, as he had promised, Gentleman
takes her to Mrs. Sucksby in the Borough. It was, it turns out, Gentleman's plan to bring
her here all along; and, Mrs. Sucksby, who had orchestrated the entire plan, reveals to a
stunned Maud that a lady, Marianne Lilly, had come to Lant Street seventeen years
earlier, pregnant and alone. When Marianne discovered her cruel father and brother had
found her, she begged Mrs. Sucksby to take her newborn child and give her one of her
'farmed' infants to take its place.
Sue, it turns out, was Marianne Lilly's true daughter, and Maud one of the many
orphaned infants who had been placed on Mrs. Sucksby's care after being abandoned.
Marianne revises her will on the night of the switch, entitling each of the two girls to
half of Marianne Lilly's fortune. By having Sue committed, Mrs. Sucksby could
intercept one share; by keeping Maud a prisoner, she could take the other half. She had
planned the switch of the two girls for seventeen years, and enlisted the help of
Gentleman to bring Maud to her in the weeks before Sue's eighteenth birthday, when she
would become legally entitled to the money. By setting Sue up as the 'mad Mrs. Rivers',
Gentleman could, by law, claim her fortune for himself.
Alone and friendless, Maud has no choice but to remain a prisoner at Lant Street.
She makes one attempt to escape to the home of one of her uncle's friends, Mr. Hawtrey,
but he turns her away, appalled at the scandal that she has fallen into, and anxious to
preserve his own reputation. Maud returns to Lant Street and finally submits to the care
of Mrs. Sucksby. It is then that Mrs. Sucksby reveals to her that Maud was not an orphan
that she took into her care, as she and Gentleman had told her, but Mrs. Sucksby's own
daughter.
Part three
The novel resumes Sue's narrative, picking up where Maud and Gentleman had
left her in the mental asylum. Sue is devastated at Maud's betrayal and furious that
Gentleman double-crossed her. When she screams to the asylum doctors that she is not
Mrs. Rivers but her maid Susan, they ignore her, as Gentleman (helped by Maud) has
convinced them that this is precisely her delusion, and that she is really Maud Lilly
Rivers, his troubled wife.
Sue is treated appallingly by the nurses in the asylum, being subjected to
beatings and taunts on a regular basis. Such is her maltreatment and loneliness that, after
a time, she begins to fear that she truly has gone mad. She is sustained by the belief that
Mrs. Sucksby will find and rescue her. Sue dwells on Maud's betrayal, the devastation of
which quickly turns to anger.
Sue's chance at freedom comes when Charles, a knife boy from Briar, comes to
visit her. He is the nephew, it turns out, of the local woman (Mrs Cream) who owned the
cottage the trio had stayed in on the night of Maud and Gentleman's wedding. Charles, a
simple boy, had been pining for the charming attentions of Gentleman to such an extent
that Mr Way, the warden of Briar, had begun to beat him severely. Charles ran away,
and had been directed to the asylum by Mrs Cream, who had no idea of the nature of the
place.
Sue quickly enlists his help in her escape, persuading him to purchase a blank
key and a file to give to her on his next visit. This he does, and Sue, using the skills
learnt growing up in the Borough, escapes from the asylum and travels with Charles to
London, with the intention of returning to Mrs. Sucksby and her home in Lant Street.
On arrival, an astonished Sue sees Maud at her bedroom window. After days of
watching the activity of her old home from a nearby boarding house, Sue sends Charles
with a letter explaining all to Mrs. Sucksby, still believing that it was Maud and
Gentleman alone who deceived her. Charles returns, saying Maud intercepted the letter,
and sends Sue a playing card—the Two of Hearts, representing lovers—in reply. Sue
takes the token as a joke, and storms into the house to confront Maud, half-mad with
rage. She tells everything to Mrs. Sucksby, who pretends to have known nothing, and
despite Mrs. Sucksby's repeated attempts to calm her, swears she will kill Maud for what
she has done to her. Gentleman arrives, and though initially shocked at Sue's escape,
laughingly begins to tell Sue how Mrs. Sucksby played her for a fool. Maud physically
tries to stop him, knowing how the truth would devastate Sue; a scuffle between Maud,
Gentleman and Mrs. Sucksby ensues, and in the confusion, Gentleman is stabbed by the
knife Sue had taken up to kill Maud, minutes earlier. He bleeds to death. A hysterical
Charles alerts the police. Mrs. Sucksby, at last sorry for how she has deceived the two
girls, immediately confesses to the murder: "Lord knows, I'm sorry for it now; but I done
it. And these girls here are innocent girls, and know nothing at all about it; and have
harmed no-one."
Mrs. Sucksby who is ‘a baby day care’ is hanged for killing Gentleman; it is
revealed that Richard Rivers was not a shamed gentleman at all, but a draper's son
named Frederick Bunt, who had had ideas above his station. Maud disappears, though
Sue sees her briefly at Mrs. Sucksby's trial and gathers from the prison matrons that
Maud had been visiting Mrs. Sucksby in the days leading up to her death. Sue remains
unaware of her true parentage, until she finds the will of Marianne Lilly tucked in the
folds of Mrs. Sucksby's gown. Realizing everything, an overwhelmed Sue sets out to
find Maud, beginning by returning to Briar. It is there she finds Maud, and the nature of
Christopher Lilly's work is finally revealed to Sue. It is further revealed that Maud is
now writing erotic fiction to sustain herself financially, publishing her stories in The
Pearl, a pornographic magazine run by one of her uncle's friends in London, William
Lazenby. The two girls, still very much in love with each other despite everything, make
peace and give vent to their feelings at last then they declare their relationship to all
those their servants at Briar.