Tipping the Velvet

"There was no question that we were going to have a Sarah Waters novel on this list. She is absolutely core to Virago, another writer always mentioned by people who want to work here, including me. I just work here so I can get an early proof of her next book! We had to have her on the list, and it made sense to start at the beginning, with Tipping the Velvet . She wrote an afterword to the book quite recently, and a lot of what she writes there is why we wanted to include it. She wrote this novel because there wasn’t much fiction where she saw herself. Not that she was a 19th-century music hall star, but in terms of having LGBTQ+ characters at the center of a blockbuster novel that is read by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s that idea of taking stories from the margins and putting them in the center. We’ve always wanted to have untold stories—the kind she’s telling about drag kings in music halls (who were called mashers) and the queer side of London. Whether it’s very poor sex workers or incredibly wealthy women who drive around in carriages plucking urchins from the streets or a working-class lesbian couple, there are all these people in the book who had rarely been represented in mainstream fiction. For all those reasons, it felt like a really important book for Virago, especially in terms of LGBTQ representation. Some people think, ‘What’s a feminist novel?’ or ‘How can you have feminist fiction?’ Sarah’s a great example of that. She is telling untold stories and uncovering hidden histories, but she’s an incredible storyteller as well. Most of her fan mail comes through us, so we see all the people for whom this book has meant so much. People have such an intimate relationship with her work. One of my close friends named both of her daughters after characters in this book. My daughter has a very unusual name, Zena, and there’s a Zena in this book. When we were starting to plan our 50th anniversary, we looked through a lot of our marketing material for the past 50 years, and we found the catalog in which Tipping the Velvet was listed. Sarah Waters is now a superstar writer, published all over the world and shortlisted for major prizes, and it was amazing to see her first outing."

"Yes. With Sarah Waters and Armistead Maupin, I want to talk broadly about their work and cultural resonance, so it made sense to choose their first books—because they had that initial impact. Yes. I really admire Sarah. Lesbian characters are right at the forefront in her books. And what’s interesting is that she has always done that. I was lucky enough to interview her for a queer radio show I used to host for many years on Resonance FM . I always loved writers who took time out of their hectic schedules to talk to a more community-focused LGBT show, because you knew they cared about the community as well. We had a really interesting conversation, because she talked about how it has never been a problem for her to put lesbians in the forefront, perhaps because she did it so unashamedly in Tipping the Velvet and set out her stall early on. She said she almost had more of a problem with The Little Stranger , the one that didn’t have lesbians in it, when she had… not exactly a negative response, but some concern from lesbian followers who were worried she was not representing them anymore. They had been holding so tightly to her as this person who was representing them, writing about them. So, almost a reverse of what other authors have told me. For example, when I spoke to Stella Duffy, she said that it was when she wrote a book with a male protagonist, that’s when she started getting nominated for prizes and taken more seriously. So Sarah had almost the exact inverse experience. But I think she’s really inspiring, and that it’s interesting, the cultural resonance this book had. Once you have a TV adaptation, and then a French and Saunders spoof, you know you have really, really made it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There was even a live stage play adaptation , where the sex scenes were interpreted as aerial acrobatics. It was quite something—women whizzing above the stage. I remember an ex-girlfriend and I reading sections of Tipping the Velvet to one another on holiday. It was the kind of book that every gay woman was reading for a while. Everyone was starting to think about lesbian history, and Sarah does so much detailed, methodical research about the history of relationships between women, and how same-sex desire was framed before it was really understood as this social construct. When I spoke to her, she was promoting her book The Paying Guests ; one of the characters talks about not having ‘the man microbe’. I thought it was interesting that there was an understanding of difference, even if the language wasn’t the same: an alternative sexual template. So yes, I love her writing. I love the funny little character traits and domestic details. She talked about going through old newspapers to find funny crimes and that kind of thing. I find her an interesting role model. And when you meet her, she’s a quiet, unassuming, lovely, sweet person who is not, you know, full of ego at all her success. Yes. Why not? Because there are plenty of heterosexual authors and filmmakers who have fairly explicit sex scenes. It’s interesting how still, within our culture, when any sexuality deviates from the norm we still think it’s more explicit, even if it’s an equivalent physical act. There are more warnings on things if there is sexual action between women, or between men. That said, I have seen quite out-there gay male films. But why not be out there? Why be ashamed of it? For most people—unless we are asexual— sex is a big part of our lives, a big part of what drives us, a big part of what makes us do interesting things, take actions, feel strong emotions. And those are often the things that are interesting to write about and tell stories about. Perhaps if you don’t understand the intensity of the sexual attraction between these protagonists, maybe we don’t understand what they are doing outside of sex."

"It is. It’s about a girl named Nan who goes off to the Pantomime Theatre, which is on the South Coast of England, and sees a girl named Kitty, who is a male impersonator, on the stage and falls in love with her. You’re not sure if it’s a sexual love or a girlish crush but she does go off to London with her and it does turn into a love affair. They begin living together but it becomes complicated because they have to hide. Then Kitty falls in love with a man and Nan is heartbroken and goes off into this strange Edwardian underworld. She sets off as a male-impersonating prostitute for a little bit and goes off with men who think she is a boy, and it’s all very odd. She then gets taken in by an aristocratic woman who wants to keep her as a mistress. Finally, she ends up living with a family who are poor and hardworking and who are saving the underclass from themselves. At this point, all these lovers from her past come back and she has to choose. You feel she is going to go off with Kitty, but is she? What I like is Waters’s sense of being very true. I think she was writing a PhD about London theatre at the turn of the century and then thought, well, I should do something that people want to read. It’s a very complete world; you really feel that you are there and that all these things are happening and you don’t have a moment where you find it hard to suspend your disbelief. Exactly. I sort of had this feeling when I first started to read it that it was trying quite hard on this shocking chic of lesbian love and overstressing it. By the end though, it became a love story and it was sort of conventional – conventional in the sense that it came down to who she loved and who was the right person for her. It transcended the fact that they were women and gay. I didn’t read it for a long time thinking that I wouldn’t enjoy the book, and it was sort of better than the sum of its parts in all kinds of ways. I really was pleased to have discovered it."