‘GAY STUFF WAS GOING ON IN AN ALMOST INVISIBLE WAY'
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Having reinvented the Victorian novel, SARAH WATERS is bringing her addictive dramas into the 19408. Allan Radcliffe speaks to a writer who knows her history.
arah Waters breathed startling new life into the
Victorian age with her award-winning novels
Tippng the Velvet. Aflinity and the Booker- shortlisted Fingersmith. This loose trilogy focused on characters existing at society‘s fringes while vividly evoking a hitherto marginalised subculture.
Nan King. 'I'ipping's heroine. journeys from gruelling beginnings as a ‘rent boy‘ and becomes concubine to an aristocrat. eventually taking the Victorian music hall by storm as a top male impersonator. .‘llliniry's Selina Dawes is a spiritualist who winds up in London‘s Millbank Prison for fraud and assault while Fingersmith follows the fortunes of Susan Trinder. an orphan brought up in a household of pickpockets and thieves. enlisted in an elaborate scheme to defraud an heiress. Waters. who has a PhD in English literature. was inspired to write her first novel while researching her thesis on lesbian historical fiction and famously drew on stacks of 19th century pornography in her quest for authenticity. Her work. which combines compelling narrative drive and unforgettable characters
with meticulous research. pulls off that rare trick of
garnering critical acclaim along with popular success. Having single-handedly invented the ‘Victorian lesbian picaresque'. Waters is now making a courageous move into uncharted historical territory. The Night Watch follows the interrelated lives of four characters in the immediate post-war years. tracing their mood of dejection back to traumatic events in I944 and l94l. ‘I went to the l94()s because I'd accumulated a lot of knowledge about the Victorian age and I wanted a change.‘ she says. ‘It was exciting and
daunting because I had a whole new set of archive to get stuck into. including tons of photographs and lilms as well as books and diaries: things that weren‘t available for my previous novels.‘
As in l’iiingvniit/t. she deftly weaves her characters' stories. Kay is haunted by memories of driving an ambulance during the Blitr. while Helen is driven to distraction by her love for the glatnoi‘ous Julia. Young Duncan keeps his head down having spent the war in prison while his sister Viv persists in an unhappy affair with a married man. She captures the buttoned-up 40s idiom beautifully without straying into parody. Ironically. though. she found depicting gay characters
more limiting here than in the Victorian age. '(iay stuff
was going on in an almost invisible way in the late ll)th century. but by the 1940s gay people almost had to be more closeted because there was open homophobia.‘
When it comes to the balance between scholarship and storytelling. Waters observes l‘rench critic Roland Barthes‘ insistence that scholarship be kept in its place as ‘a complement of writing'. with gusto. ‘The great thing about moving from academia to liction is that it's so fantastically liberating. You're not limited to things that actually happened. you‘re creating characters and dealing with emotions and the imagination.~ So. would she consider writing fiction with a contemporary setting'.’ ‘I might. though my way into l'iction was always through my interest in the past. The two things kind of complement each other.’
The Night Watch is published by Virago on Thu 2 Feb.
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ii Jennl Calder Wonder if Americans go around saying “what have the Scots ever done for us? This book launch will answer that in the affirmative. National Library of Scotland. Edinburgh, Wed 15 Feb.
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