Sarah Waters
With “Tipping the Velvet” and “Fingersmith”, she wrote lesbian women into Victorian England – and into the bestseller lists.
Sarah Waters was born in Neyland in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and grew up partly in Middlesbrough, the daughter of an engineer. She was the first in her family to go to university, studied English literature in Kent and Lancaster and wrote her doctorate in London on lesbian and gay historical fiction since 1870. While researching it she read Victorian pornography and found the title of her first novel.
“Tipping the Velvet” (1998), named after Victorian slang for oral sex between women, tells the story of an oyster girl from Whitstable who falls in love with a male impersonator in the music halls. The picaresque novel was a success and was adapted by the BBC in 2002. “Affinity” (1999) and “Fingersmith” (2002), a story of two young women caught up in a plot of fraud and love, followed; “Fingersmith” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted by Park Chan-wook as the film “The Handmaiden”.
Her later novels moved into the 20th century: “The Night Watch” (2006) about women in London during the Second World War, the ghost story “The Little Stranger” (2009) and “The Paying Guests” (2014). Waters, who came out as a lesbian in the late 1980s, has said she writes “with a clear lesbian agenda”: she teases out lesbian stories from parts of history regarded as heterosexual.
Her books have been translated into many languages and have made her one of the most successful British novelists of her generation.