Novelist Sarah Waters: "Lesbian Stories Are Just Human Stories, and They Matter to Everyone" | Interviews

Their life journeys are shaped by the fact that they are gay, but the obstacles they meet and the emotions they feel — desire, loss, betrayal, frustration — are the same for everyone.

For Sarah Waters, the British writer who was 36 at the time, 2002 was a pivotal year.

Waters's first novel, Tipping the Velvet — a lesbian story set in the Victorian era, published in 1998 — was adapted by the BBC into a three-part television series of the same name.

"I was writing full-time and picking up the odd bit of part-time teaching, but by 2000 there was almost none of that left, so there really wasn't much money then... It wasn't until 2002 that my life changed," Waters said.

When Tipping the Velvet first came out, the print run was a little over 5,000 copies. Its lesbian subject matter was fresh and daring, so the book drew attention quickly, and bookshops in central London with dedicated gay and lesbian sections put it on their recommended lists.

That year The Sunday Times named Waters its Young Writer of the Year, and both The New York Times and Library Journal picked Tipping the Velvet as one of the best books of the year. For a first-time novelist, that was a strong showing.

But Waters could not have predicted that four years later the BBC would turn Tipping the Velvet into a television series, carrying her story and her name out of a niche readership and into the mainstream — including to her own mother, who had never been much of a "reader."

"The fact that [the series] got my mum saying the word 'dildo' — I thought that had to count as success," Waters said in an interview with The Guardian.

Over the dozen-odd years that followed, Waters wrote a string of other influential novels — six in all so far, five of them built on lesbian themes. Those books have also earned her three Man Booker Prize nominations.

Of all her work, the best known is the "Victorian trilogy": Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith. The three books are not linked by story; they are called a trilogy only because they are all set in the Victorian era.

Besides her bold, provocative subjects, the intricate, twisting plots of Waters's stories have gradually won her the attention of film and television companies. Along with the Tipping the Velvet adaptation, Fingersmith, published in 2009, was turned by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook into the 2014 film The Handmaiden, which moves the story from the Victorian era to Korea under Japanese colonial rule. The film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or in the main competition at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.

Films and television with gay and lesbian themes are becoming mainstream. "Gay romance is getting more and more popular, and some films are more popular than the books behind them — Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Call Me by Your Name, both mainstream successes. That is because gay and lesbian characters can now appear in mainstream work as complex, many-sided people carrying big, moving stories," Waters told QDaily.

In fact, one big reason the "Victorian trilogy" makes such good reading is its setting: people are curious about how life was lived then.

The Victorian era usually refers to the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1851 to 1901 — the strongest stretch in British history, when the Industrial Revolution and imperialism together produced an "empire on which the sun never set," with colonies across the globe.

Once a society starts developing fast, change is bound to follow, and new currents of thought begin to stir — some of them about the liberation of gender, desire, knowledge and rights.

The title Tipping the Velvet comes from a coy piece of Victorian obscene slang for the vulva.

The story is told in the first person by a girl named Nancy from the English seaside town of Whitstable. At the theater one day she is captivated by Kitty Butler, a male impersonator from Faversham. Nancy cannot say where that flutter comes from, so she starts going to the theater alone every day to watch the act. After the two meet, Nancy follows Kitty Butler to London and takes up the same trade, performing as a music-hall male impersonator; over those years the two fall in love and then part. Betrayed by her lover, Nancy changes identity again and becomes a "rent boy" on the streets of London — a life that begins with an act of oral sex on an officer in an alley.

In so conservative an age, Nancy's experiences look thoroughly transgressive. That is exactly why readers can follow her eyes to glimpse forbidden queer desire and, at the same time, wander the edges of the city's landscape, watching how people of different classes really lived.

"I'm interested in the Victorian era because many modern concepts began then — sexual orientation, homosexuality, heterosexuality. A lot of the research I did while writing my doctoral thesis turned out to be useful for my novels. I also read a great many news reports and books from the period. The journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew, for instance, went out and interviewed people on the street and recorded their lives, though his records usually came filtered through a middle-class point of view," Waters said in an interview with The Paper last year.

Critics have called Waters's novels "neo-Victorian fiction": work committed to recreating what was particular about the Victorian era, and looking there for the roots of contemporary culture.

Waters's stories really are hard to sum up in a line. Beyond the intricate turns of plot, her protagonists — women above all — always go through a dangerous journey, whether pressed by social structures or caught in their own struggles over identity. But running through these harrowing stories is one constant: love between women, and the effort to break out of patriarchy's mold and find other ways to live. Her novels may end in sorrow, and they still carry the sense of an old era ending and new values being born.

Waters's sex scenes leave a mark too. It is in fact hard to square her baby face with the explicit, charged sex in her books. Writing like that went unregarded in literary fiction for a long time. But the eroticism in her novels has given people a chance to discuss that art of writing, and to take it back.

"There is plenty of lesbian description in men's erotica. But it is all written by men, for men. I thought: what happens if you take those descriptions out of erotica and remove the male gaze? That is what I wanted to explore in Fingersmith," Waters said.

Some writers who also write about homosexuality dislike having the media label their work "gay literature" or call them "gay writers," because the label can mean the outside world's reading of their work is simplified, narrowed and boxed in.

Waters, a lesbian herself, has no such objection. She is glad to be introduced to the world as a "lesbian writer," even knowing that a single label may cost her work some of its plurality. "I tend to overplay the lesbian label in interviews, purely because I have this naive political faith that you can never say that word too often."

Today British society, which permits same-sex marriage, is far more open on LGBT questions than it once was.

But Waters, born in 1966, grew up through "unfriendly times." In the 1980s, when she walked down the street, passersby would still shout abuse at gay people.

Waters told QDaily that in a homophobic society we often see gay people drawn as "other" — strange, unhealthy, marginal — and that what she wants to do is put lesbian characters at the center of the story: lesbian stories are just human stories, and they matter to everyone.

When she wrote her first novel, the feminist movement had reached a new turning point: "third-wave feminism," a term coined by the American writer Rebecca Walker in her essay "Becoming the Third Wave."

One of the questions third-wave feminism took up was lesbianism.

Over that decade, lesbians used public action of many kinds to make people aware they existed. In 1997 an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement reported that "students marched in Brighton this week demanding equality for gay men, lesbians and bisexuals." Cath Fletcher, convenor of the National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Students' Union, said: "We want the next government to bring in comprehensive equality legislation." The following year, students launched another campaign for gay and lesbian rights.

At the same time, Waters was working on a doctorate at Canterbury University, researching late-19th-century gay and lesbian literature. "It was while I was writing my thesis — on gay and lesbian historical fiction — that I first started wanting to try writing a novel of my own." Without that wave of activism, she added, "I could never have become a writer."

Waters also believes that when a society is on the verge of change, the anger and sense of mission that come out of dissatisfaction may be exactly where gay literature's vitality lies. "The best conditions are ones that let gay writers and gay communities feel strong and confident in themselves while still carrying an inner anger and sense of mission — Britain in the 1990s, for instance, produced some great lesbian novels for that reason."

This July, the simplified Chinese edition of Waters's 2014 novel The Paying Guests was published in China. The story is set in Britain after the First World War. Frances grew up in a wealthy family, but her father and brothers died in the war and the household lost its income. To keep up a respectable life, she and her mother let the second floor of the house to another family, and the young Barbers move in. Living under one roof, Frances and Lilian Barber go from strangers to lovers; as the people around them grow suspicious, the secrets inside the house shift, and it all eventually sets off a crime that ends in tragedy.

Below are excerpts from Waters's conversation with QDaily about her recent novel The Paying Guests, and about the state of gay literature today:

Q: QDaily S: Sarah Waters

Q: The Paying Guests is set in Britain after the First World War, which is different from the periods of your earlier novels. How did that different historical setting affect your writing style?

S: It changed quite a lot, because I wanted the style to match the mood of the period. My first three novels were all set in the Victorian era, and the prose expanded along with that period — it became more alluring. My next two novels were set in the 1940s, and the prose naturally turned more restrained.

The Paying Guests is set in 1922, a fascinating period in British history because so much was changing then — class relations, gender roles. The novel does end in a conventional way, but there is a great deal of unconventional material inside the story. I wanted it to look at first as though it strictly obeys the conventions of the domestic, middle-class novel, and then to swerve into passion and violence.

Q: Where did the title The Paying Guests come from?

S: "Paying guests" is a euphemism from British high society — a phrase once used by the impoverished middle class, who had to let out rooms in their homes to make money but could not bring themselves to use the (lower-class) word "lodgers." It fits the action of the book — and it really is a contradictory phrase, isn't it? How can a "guest" also be someone who "pays"? So that tension suits it well too.

Q: Do you think of The Paying Guests as a crime novel, a love story or a historical novel?

I think it is all three, but first of all it is a love story — a love story complicated by a crime.

Q: If it is a love story, it is a fairly sad one, with a real sense of loss about human nature. Do you agree with that reading?

It really is a sad story. The two main characters, Frances and Lilian, end in tragedy, and the secondary characters are hurt too — some of them wounded beyond repair before the novel even opens.

The crime in The Paying Guests does test the love between Frances and Lilian, and pushes them both to the edge of collapse: we see them do some not very creditable things, growing paranoid out of fear. But there are moments of courage and nobility in the novel as well. I tried to write with sympathy, even about weakness and cowardice. I don't believe in bad people — only in people caught in difficulty. So I think this novel is full of hope too.

Q: I've noticed that important settings recur in your novels — the iconic "big house," for example. Using The Paying Guests, could you talk about how you build a good setting in a novel, so that setting and story reinforce each other?

Yes, my novels often have classic buildings in them that almost become characters in their own right: prisons, asylums, country houses. The building in The Paying Guests is much smaller than the others, though — a suburban villa with a small garden.

But the inside of the house is divided between two households, which opens up all sorts of possibilities for the story. How do you share domestic space with strangers? Where in the house do you run into each other? What might you overhear through a bedroom wall? What might you catch sight of through a half-open door?

Add secrets and lies to that — a forbidden passion, an improper affair — and things get more interesting. I'm especially fascinated by thresholds: who can cross them, when and how, and what happens when they are broken in unexpected or subversive ways.

Q: Of all the characters you have created, do you have a favorite?

It's hard to pick just one. I'm very fond of Frances and Lilian in The Paying Guests — Frances especially, she is so independent. But I could say the same of Caroline in The Little Stranger, and of Kay, the butch protagonist of The Night Watch. I think those three characters are close relatives.

Q: Looking across the lesbian characters in your six novels, is there anything in particular you want to convey to readers?

I don't really have many ideas I want to convey all at once, and not all my lesbian characters are admirable — but I think that is the whole point, really! In a homophobic society we're used to seeing gay people drawn as "other" — strange or unhealthy, or figures pushed to the margins of the "real" story. But I have always wanted to put lesbian characters at the center of my stories, insisting that lesbian stories are just human stories and that they matter to everyone. So my protagonists' sexual orientation matters, and also doesn't matter very much. Their life journeys are shaped by the fact that they are gay, but the obstacles they meet and the emotions they feel — desire, loss, betrayal, frustration — are the same for everyone.

Q: The lesbian feminist movement reached a high point before your first novel was published. Did it affect your writing?

Of course. I would even say I could not have become a writer without that wave, because my writing comes largely out of my reading. I started writing in the mid-1990s, at the height of British feminist and lesbian (and gay) fiction. I read a lot of novels that felt thrilling and daring — coming-out novels, lesbian science fiction, lesbian thrillers, romances and historical novels — and I thought, 'I want to write a novel like that.' That is what pushed me to begin Tipping the Velvet, a novel full of fun and energy, marked by nerve and a taste for adventure.

Q: Have you noticed changes in British gay literature in recent years?

I think there have been huge, positive changes for gay people in British society in recent years, and paradoxically that may have left "gay literature" less cohesive than it used to be. Gay writers no longer feel the old urgency to tell gay stories, because to some extent those stories already exist inside the mainstream — which was not true twenty years ago. For the same reason, non-gay writers are more willing to put gay plots and characters into their work. So "gay stories" are more varied now, and less easily labeled.

Q: What conditions do you think a society needs in order to have good gay literature?

That is an interesting question. My instinct is to say that producing good gay literature — or, for that matter, any good literature — requires an open, healthy society that embraces diversity... But in Britain a lot of fine gay work was produced in repressive periods, when gay writing could not be public at all and had to be heavily encoded (some of Oscar Wilde's books and plays, for instance). Maybe the best conditions are ones that let gay writers and gay communities feel strong and confident in themselves while still carrying an inner anger and sense of mission — Britain in the 1990s, for example, produced some great lesbian novels for that very reason.

Q: How do you think LGBT people should tell their own stories on public platforms?

The same way as anyone else: honestly, carefully, with dignity, with sympathy, with respect for other people's views — and, if possible, with a style of their own. What I mean is, don't repeat clichés; work to make the language feel urgent and fresh.

Q: What is the most common misconception people have about gay literature?

First, that it is "niche" and only of interest to gay readers. Read the novels of great gay writers — Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, Ali Smith, Michael Cunningham — and you see at once how wrong that is; these books reach and hold huge numbers of readers. Second, that it is only about sex. When a writer like Alan Hollinghurst writes about sex, his prose is so good and so precise that he turns sex into something important and extraordinary.

Q: Are there social issues, or feminist issues, you particularly care about at the moment?

The world is in a terrible state right now. In Europe and the United States we can see right-wing populism rising, and anti-immigrant agendas — that is very worrying. Not to mention climate change... But feminism, in Britain at least, seems to be thriving, which is good. Something like the MeToo movement has exposed a tradition of sexism that went unchallenged for a very long time — as if it were simply part of life, something women had to put up with — and it is finally being shown to be unacceptable. I think that is wonderful, really inspiring.

Q: What have you been busy with lately? Anything new?

For the past few years I have been working hard on a new novel. I'm about three-quarters of the way through it now, and the process has been very interesting — very slow, with a lot to work out along the way. You might think that after six novels I'd find the seventh easier, but each one brings new challenges. That's a good thing, though. It keeps me alert, and keeps the writing alive.

Cover image from Horizon Books.