Review
------
The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel
knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her
her's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring
soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't believe the story
told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an
oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for
lunch--for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies,
never looked beyond my her's kitchen for occupation, or for
love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music
hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience
member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still
something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of
innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.
Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as
tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter
with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at
first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending
pal, all but her sister, best friend, and bedmate, Alice, "her
eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion". Not to
worry. Soon Nancy and Kitty are off to London, their relationship
close though (alas for our heroine) sisterly. We know that bliss
will come, and it does, in an exceptionally charged moment. A
lesser author would have been content to stop her story there,
but Waters has much more in mind for her buttonholing heroine,
and for us. In brief, her Everywoman with a sexual difference
goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male
prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to
keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement.
And did I mention her long stint as a plaything in the pleasure
palace of a rich Sapphist extraordinaire? Diana Lethaby is as
cruel as she is carnal, and even the well- concealed Cavendish
Ladies' Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in
full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away.
"We are here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular."
Only after some seven years of hard twists and turns
does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough.
Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will
wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice
as long. --Kerry Fried, .com
Review
------
The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel
knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her
her's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring
soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't believe the story
told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an
oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for
lunch--for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies,
never looked beyond my her's kitchen for occupation, or for
love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music
hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience
member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still
something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of
innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.
(Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as
tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter
with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at
first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending
pal, all bu)
Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in full,
elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. "We are
here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular." (Only after
some seven years of hard twists and turns does Nancy
conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, Tipping
the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her
sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long)
Kerry Fried, .com ('An unstoppable read, a sexy and picaresque
romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaring
Nineties. Imagine Jeanette Winterson on a good day, collaborating
with Judith Butler to pen a sapphic Moll Flanders. Could this be
a new genre? The)
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY ('She is an extremely confident writer,
combining precise, sensuous descriptions with irony and wit.
Thisis a lively, gutsy, highly readable debut, probably destined
to become a lesbian classic’)