Sarah Waters' knack for demi-monde

By MARGIE THOMSON

Welsh lesbian writer Sarah Waters seems awfully harmless to have produced what must be one of the only literary novels sold in New Zealand in shrink-wrap plastic with a moral warning emblazoned on the cover (not quite lock up your daughters, but restricting the readership to those aged 18 or over).

You would expect an author of such infamy, who is busily creating her own dark genre of lesbian gothic, to have a sweeping, dominating, voracious presence, but in fact Waters is compact, very youthful, and with a quiet charm that made her one of the surprise hits of the Auckland Writers' Festival this year.

Not well known here before the festival, by the time she had finished reading the beautiful opening pages of an unzipped copy of Tipping the Velvet (Virago, $26.95) she had her audience queuing to buy and have signed copies of both that and her second novel, Affinity (Virago, $25.95). In Britain, where she has been compared to both Georgette Heyer and Jeanette Winterson, she is better known and has won various awards including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was runner-up for the Welsh Book of the Year Award last year for Affinity.

Post-festival, her books are hot property in Auckland, being handed around from reader to reader - oh, not for the sex, of course (although there is quite a bit of lesbian sex in Tipping the Velvet, whose title is Victorian slang for cunnilingus, it doesn't predominate in the way the shrink-wrap implies) - but because we love this gothic, exotic Victorian world that Waters so convincingly recreates.

She has a knack for the demi-monde, for the darker corners of society where eccentric characters live lives largely unnoted in the mainstream: Victorian music hall male-impersonators, for instance; spiritualists, who were a major phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century but are virtually forgotten now; rent boys; London social clubs where unconventional women could associate; the multi-tragedies within the women's prison system; the corseting of clever women into domestic slavery; the emotional ambiguity of the Victorian age, where the powerful morality of the era masked the real nature of human activity and desire.

Waters has staked out her ground, and fans will be pleased to know she's not stopping yet. Her third novel, Fingersmith, is almost completed, and once again it is set in the century-before-last, in the 1860s, gothic but more upbeat than the other two, she says.

She has taken Wilkie Collins' pioneering mystery novel of 1860, The Woman in White, retelling the story of a defrauded heiress locked away in a lunatic asylum. "I love the Victorian age, she says. "It's not a matter of nostalgia; it's the grimness that attracts me. It was a time of such awful contrasts, of great wealth and poverty. But it was also a very idiosyncratic time, before the mass media had introduced a level of conformity to our lives. Then, there were these pockets of eccentricity and strangeness. Also, it is a very recent time, just beyond living memory."

Waters became fascinated by the Victoria era while she was studying for her PhD in English literature, writing a thesis on lesbian historical fiction. Indeed, it is her skill as a researcher, as well as her obvious talent as a storyteller, which gives such richness to her novels. Her many weeks in the British Library's copyright section, her investigations of court records (male homosexuality was illegal in Victorian England, and there are many accounts of it from which she has extrapolated to furnish her writing about, for instance, rent boys), her reading of magazines and newspapers of the day, all add a sense of veracity and depth to her fiction.

"There is a lot of documentation of gay men's activities, but lesbian activity was never criminalised, and it's more likely that it crops up in letters than in criminal records," she says.

Gay men and women often try to establish a kind of provenance for their culture and identity, a sense of their own history. Yet, Waters says, their past was much less categorised than our modern paradigm allows for.

"Today, we lay claim to a particular kind of sexual identity, but in the 19th century people might not have identified with categories like that. But at the same time it's clear that women and men were engaging in homosexual and lesbian activities without calling themselves lesbian or gay, and I wonder if we have not lost a lot of freedom around sex and sexual identity."

Labels, she says, have their uses, and to that extent she doesn't have a problem with being known as a lesbian writer: it's who she is, and a large part of her subject matter. But what makes her books accessible to heterosexual readers is that she simply takes her characters' lesbianism for granted. Unlike much lesbian fiction, they are not coming-out stories (or pulp, or detective novels). Waters' characters do not angst over identity; they just are, and the narrative flows from that point of acceptance into other areas of broader interest.

Welsh by birth (which along with her gayness has given her added insight into issues of cultural marginalisation), Waters now lives in London, in a large squat in Brixton which she shares with two other women. Writing is very much her job: she works at home during the day and if she gets tired of being alone, she has only to step outside into the bustling, noisy streets for company.

Her own writers of choice are not necessarily other lesbians, although, she says, there are some really good ones such as Emma Donoghue and Ali Smith, but those voices from the past who, like spiritualists, we can summon at any moment we choose: Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, Wilkie Collins.

"Research is not only perpetual but a lot of fun as well: I am continually delighted and amazed by the small details of Victorian life," she says happily.