Misadventures of an oyster-girl
Aug. 29th, 2022 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAt the end of 2020 I read Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, which I liked so much that the very next time I went to a bookstore I picked up a copy of her first and most famous novel, Tipping the Velvet, which then proceeded to sit on my shelf for a year and a half (this is actually not a particularly long time for something to sit on my TBR shelf, all things considered). I finally started reading it last week because I was in the mood for some theatrical gay shit, and this promised to be both very theatrical and very gay.
Tipping the Velvet follows the (mis)adventures of our heroine Nancy Astley, sometimes known as Nan King, an oyster girl from Whitstable in Kent, as she falls in love with a music-hall performer, a male impersonator named Kitty Butler. This results in her moving to London where she becomes Kitty’s secret girlfriend and performance partner in a drag double act; when they break up, she becomes a rentboy, then the kept plaything of a terrible rich middle-aged lesbian, then the housekeeper for a family of socialists. The book is much hornier than Fingersmith but otherwise has a similar vibe of late 19th-century English demimonde nonsense with lots of bonkers slang. Personally I found the last section of the book where she falls in with a bunch of socialist organizers–half of whom are apparently also “toms,” i.e. lesbians–to be the most fun to read. Some things haven’t changed all that much in the past 130 years, it seems, except that now we have Signal.
There isn’t really one overarching plot, it’s just Nan’s life story getting into and out of scrapes related to being extremely gay in late 19th century England. It’s an exciting enough series of scrapes; she should have died several times over, and is periodically saved by the skin of her teeth through run-ins with souls much more kindly than she is (Nan can be kind of a dick). Its real triumph is that it’s very immersive and beautifully (over)written. The edition I got has an afterword written by the author 20 years later, which gives some hilarious critiques–much funnier than any critiques I’d be able to make–which include some critiques of the overwriting, but in my opinion if you’re going for “19th century memoir,” longwinded is the name of the game. The effusive first-person narration also gives it big “sensation novel” vibes, which is probably deliberate given that it is, in short, a story about an innocent English country girl running away to the big bad city and getting all kinds of ~debauched~.
The overall verdict is that there seems to be a very specific Sarah Waters novel sort of vibe and I enjoy it very much when I am in the mood for that kind of vibe, which I will keep in mind next time I am in a similar mood.
Tipping the Velvet follows the (mis)adventures of our heroine Nancy Astley, sometimes known as Nan King, an oyster girl from Whitstable in Kent, as she falls in love with a music-hall performer, a male impersonator named Kitty Butler. This results in her moving to London where she becomes Kitty’s secret girlfriend and performance partner in a drag double act; when they break up, she becomes a rentboy, then the kept plaything of a terrible rich middle-aged lesbian, then the housekeeper for a family of socialists. The book is much hornier than Fingersmith but otherwise has a similar vibe of late 19th-century English demimonde nonsense with lots of bonkers slang. Personally I found the last section of the book where she falls in with a bunch of socialist organizers–half of whom are apparently also “toms,” i.e. lesbians–to be the most fun to read. Some things haven’t changed all that much in the past 130 years, it seems, except that now we have Signal.
There isn’t really one overarching plot, it’s just Nan’s life story getting into and out of scrapes related to being extremely gay in late 19th century England. It’s an exciting enough series of scrapes; she should have died several times over, and is periodically saved by the skin of her teeth through run-ins with souls much more kindly than she is (Nan can be kind of a dick). Its real triumph is that it’s very immersive and beautifully (over)written. The edition I got has an afterword written by the author 20 years later, which gives some hilarious critiques–much funnier than any critiques I’d be able to make–which include some critiques of the overwriting, but in my opinion if you’re going for “19th century memoir,” longwinded is the name of the game. The effusive first-person narration also gives it big “sensation novel” vibes, which is probably deliberate given that it is, in short, a story about an innocent English country girl running away to the big bad city and getting all kinds of ~debauched~.
The overall verdict is that there seems to be a very specific Sarah Waters novel sort of vibe and I enjoy it very much when I am in the mood for that kind of vibe, which I will keep in mind next time I am in a similar mood.