Although Sarah Waters lives and writes in England, I had a recent spot
of good luck in that she came to New York City briefly to meet with her American editors
and had some time to meet me at a Greenwich Village coffeehouse where we sat and
chatted about her two novels, Tipping the Velvet and Affinity. Waters
smashes the clichés of "lesbian literature"--especially its (too often deserved)
reputation for poor literary quality--with these two stories set in Victorian England. Her
prose quite deftly captures the voice of British novels of the period, but it's her rich
characterizations--and, in Affinity, her skillful development of suspense--that have
garnered the novels critical praise from mainstream reviewers as well as the gay and lesbian
press.
RH: Had you been writing fiction when you were younger, before you started
working on your advanced degrees in literary studies?
SW: No, not at all. It was only through doing the Ph.D. thesis that I was able to
go on and do the fiction; it gave me the discipline and the confidence to write. As soon as I
finished the thesis--well, I'd had the idea for the first novel, Tipping the Velvet,
while I was writing the thesis, and I tried to start writing the novel too, but it was too hard
to be doing two things at once. So as soon as I finished, I gave myself a year to try and
write the novel, and it was like, "Oh my God, can I even write fiction at all?" It took about
18 months altogether. I suppose I'd done some research before for the thesis that I could
use, but as I went along I did research for the other sections, too.
RH: What was your field of study?
SW: It was lesbian and gay literature, modern lesbian and gay writing from
roughly the late nineteenth century. In that sense it really led straight into the novels, or
rather the novels came out of the kinds of thinking I was doing.
RH: What interested you specifically in the late Victorian setting when you started that
first novel?
SW: I touched on it when I was doing the thesis, looking at gay men's writing
from the period--there's quite a lot of it, and it was very identifiable, you know, Wilde and
the people around Wilde, and so on. It's a hinge time between earlier nineteen century
stuff which is really quite foreign to us and the modernist stuff, as well as a time when we
began to get a recognizably modern gay subculture. I thought about what there might be
around for women, lesbians of the period, and so the music hall, male impersonation...I
got into what that might mean for women viewers and for the women doing it. have read a
lot, and do still read a lot, of Victorian fiction because it's a way of really getting into the
period--simply immersing yourself in it. I found it came quite naturally in a way to write in
a Victorian style.
RH: How did you get the idea for the second novel, Affinity?
SW: The first one is very upbeat, you know, kind of a romp. I began to think it
would be interesting to write something that was a bit grimmer and a bit darker. I've been
interested in spiritualism for a long time. I was writing a academic article on it when I
finished Tipping, though even before that I'd been interested in it as a
phenomenon. And I'd been very interested in prisons, too, so I just saw this possibility of
bringing the two things together, prisons and spiritualism, which at first seemed quite
arbitrary. As I began to write, though, I began to see connections and overlaps between
them institutions.
It was also a question of doing something more or less in the same period
as Tipping, but very different in that while the first novel deliberately had a wide
range of models for lesbian communities, I wrote Affinity with characters who for
the most part didn't have any lesbian models at all. There's Margaret's isolated and
unreturned passion, and there's the world with the prisons which obviously could breed
quite strong female attachments which you wouldn't necessarily call lesbianism,
attachments that could be erotic or non-erotic, but very intense either way. And
spiritualism too allowed for the possibility of quite queer things going on--I mean queer in
every sense of the word, including the erotic. You had women impersonating male spirits
and with that potential for contact in a spiritualist setting between women, I was
intrigued.
RH: When you were researching the spiritualist world, did you run into examples of
the "sexual therapy" for unknowing lesbians you describe in the novel?
SW: Not explicitly, no, but the whole idea of affinities intrigued me. There was
certainly a lot of talk around the idea. Spiritualist were often charged with being anti-
marriage and pro-divorce, because they'd argue that you could marry the wrong person,
that you could have an affinity with someone else, and so you should be allowed to break
these temporal bonds for the sake of the longer lasting affinity. So some spiritualists
certainly took a more liberal approach to relationships, but I didn't really actually come
across in my research evidence that that was being used by lesbians or gay men in support
of their own relationships. Still, I began to see it as a possibility. And, too, one of the big
nineteenth century male spiritualists had quite a strange relationship with a young aristocrat,
and it's quite possible to read between the lines of the literature around them and conclude
that there was something erotic going on.
RH: Are you staying with the Victorian era for your next novel?
SW: Yes, but slightly earlier, in the 1860s this time. I feel I've gone just about
as Victorian as I can possibly go with this new book. It's lighter than Affinity,
more of a melodrama, drawing from the melodramatic sensation fiction of the period. It's
been good fun to write, more so than Affinity which is quite grim to write. But I
think after this I might leave the Victorian area for awhile.
RH: That must be a rather daunting prospect.
SW: But it's a challenge as well, and I think I've got to a point where it would
be good for me to take on a different idiom, to be drawing upon a different set of
traditions.
RH: And you don't want to be typecast.
SW: No, I don't. I was worried about that, what with doing these two and then
another one. But then there's something about three--they're not a trilogy, but there's still a
sense of completion to having written three and then moving on.
RH: You've stopped doing academic research, though I gather that you've continued
to teach. Do you want to go back to the academy at some point, or is it pretty much creative
writing from this point onward?
SW: I stopped teaching actually. I want to press on with the writing for the
foreseeable future. The academic world is such that when you're teaching, you really need
to be researching and publishing as well, and once you've left, it's impossibly difficult to
get back in and catch up with what's happened in the field since you left. But I've done
creative writing teaching recently for the first time, and I might pursue that a bit more if I
get the chance.
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