Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.
A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'.
Tipping the Velvet is a historical novel pubished as Sarah Water's debut novel in 1998. Set in Victorian England during the 1890s, it tells a coming-of-age tory about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator. Nan follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city.
The novel has pervasive lesbian themes, concentrating on eroticism and self-discovery. Waters was working on a PhD dissertation in English literature when she decided to write a story she would like to read. Employing her love for the variety of people and districts in London, she consciously chose an urban setting. As opposed to previous lesbian-themed fiction she had read where the characters escape an oppressive society to live apart from it, Waters chose characters who interact with their surroundings. She has acknowledged that the book imagines a lesbian presence and history in Victorian London where none was recorded. The main character's experiences in the theatrical profession and her perpetual motion through the city allow her to make observations on social conditions while exploring the issues of gender, sexism, and class difference.
I really enjoy Waters' fiction. Through her writing she tries to convey what one might come to view as insights into what it is to form same-sex relationships, hitherto from the female perspective. Quite apart from the compelling narratives of her stories that she creates, the heterosexual reader may begin to develop some understanding of the similarities and the differences between the lesbian life and more traditional adult relationships.
I really enjoy Waters' fiction. Through her writing she tries to convey what one might come to view as insights into what it is to form same-sex relationships, hitherto from the female perspective. Quite apart from the compelling narratives of her stories that she creates, the heterosexual reader may begin to develop some understanding of the similarities and the differences between the lesbian life and more traditional adult relationships.
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