To over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy

A few years ago at Christmas, my mom and my brother and I went to see a stage adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith at the A.R.T. While I remember some things about the play very clearly and others not at all--including most of the plot, and, sometimes, the title, leading me to occasionally wonder, when it was brought up, if it wasn’t a stage adaptation of Amberlough that I’d seen, since I haven’t read that either--I remember enough of the general Dickensian vibes that it has stuck in my head as being somehow a Christmas story, like A Christmas Carol, even though it is not actually a Christmas story at all. But as I think it is one and it’s December and also somebody recently reminded me that it was a novel before it was a play, I figured now was a good time to read it.

 

The book is about 600 pages long, which further affirms my belief that this is the sort of book to read in the winter, when you should be spending many consecutive hours curled up on the couch with a hot toddy (especially this year, when parties are out of the question). It takes place half in the slums of London, in a family-like clique of criminals based out of a house in which a woman named Mrs. Sucksby farms babies, and the other half in a run-down, destitute manor house out in the English countryside, inhabited only by a crabby old scholar of questionable childrearing abilities, his lovely and deeply bored teenage niece, and a handful of servants. In other words, it is absolute catnip for people like me, whomst love overblown 19th century British novels, especially of the “sensation novel” variety. I don’t know what books Waters cites as her particular inspirations for writing this, but for this specific reader, I felt like Fingersmith would be what you got if you put all my favorite reads from college in a jar and shook it up to make a new story, the way The BFG did with dreams. The book starts off discussing Oliver Twist and there’s certainly a similar color to the inhabitants of Lant Street; the big plot twist around Maud’s education made me immediately think of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and the mistaken identities, mysterious parentages, and locking ladies up in madhouses brings me back to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and a whole bunch of other books I haven’t quite gotten around to reading but were discussed in the lit crit articles about female criminals and madwomen in late Victorian literature that I read junior year and only half-remember. But anyway, the Victorians were very obsessed with ladies doing crimes, and I am also very obsessed with ladies doing crimes, and if you want to learn more about the Victorian obsession with ladies doing crimes I highly recommend The Invention of Murder.

 

Storywise, this book is about one young lass raised in the baby farm named Sue Trinder, who is quite a clever, well-trained criminal mind in some ways but an endearing level of dumbass in some others. Sue is recruited to a scheme to go to the country and serve as a lady’s maid to a young woman who stands to inherit fifteen thousand pounds, but only when she gets married, and to help maneuver this young lady into marrying the baby farm’s resident handsome con man, Gentleman. Gentleman then plans to have the young lady committed to a madhouse, and pay Sue three thousand of the fifteen thousand pounds for her help. City girl Sue then goes out to the grim, dilapidated Briar House, and has to acclimate to what she finds to be all the weird shit that goes on there, but which is in fact only a fraction of the weird shit that goes on there. Sue doesn’t know just how weird the goings-on in the house really are because most of them concern the old man’s book collection and the secretarial work he is making his niece do for him, and Sue is illiterate.

 

The niece, Maud, is a bit neurotic, but probably not any more neurotic than anyone would be living the way she’s being made to live, with absolutely no normal people around to model normal behavior for her. Maud seems like a simple enough weirdo to Sue at first, but she turns out to be much more complex than Sue knows, and also much more interested in doing crimes. The parts of the book told from Maud’s point of view are, shall we say, extremely different than the exact same goings-on told from Sue’s point of view.

 

Complicating the intricate network of crossings and double-crossings that develop when doing crimes of the “marrying people under false pretenses to steal their money” genre, Maud and Sue also develop a romance. Though being gay and doing crimes are generally considered a well-matched pair of activities, in this case, the crimes in question put a lot of strain on their relationship. There is actually only one sex scene in the book, but it is told twice, and, as previously mentioned, it is extremely different from Maud’s perspective than from Sue’s, in ways that I cannot even begin to discuss without massive spoilers, because this is the sort of book where the plot turns completely on its head multiple times before things get resolved. 

 

Despite being very long and, in many places, aping the sort of overdone writing style of popular Victorian novels, which a lot of people find slow, I found this book to be a very fast read (it probably helps that I’ve read enough popular Victorian novels to be used to that type of emotional overwriting); I got through the first 300 pages in one sitting, and most of the rest in a second sitting the following weekend (it was a busy week in between).