I approached Sarah Waters' first novel Tipping the Velvet (Penguin, 1999; previously published by Virago Press, 1998) with skepticism. An intriguing premise (young woman in late 1880s Kent develops passionate crush on male impersonator, follows her to London, makes own stage debut simultaneously with discovery of lesbian identity, loses love of life to male rival, encounters misadventures in the twilight demimonde of late 19th century "perverts", finds real love with committed lesbian/socialist met by chance years before) obviously doesn't always (or even usually) make for a good read, and the information that the author has a Ph.D in English, the same degree the present writer will soon hold, suggested nothing so much as the possibility that Waters had written the same book any of my more Sapphically-minded colleagues might have turned out, full of arch intimations of an extensive knowledge of the past 20 years of queer theory and poorly-integrated details about Victorian life which I would feel compelled to justify as stemming not from a lack of writerly skill but rather from a deliberate attempt to rupture the narrative and highlight the fact that the text wears its "realism" as foregrounded artifice, mimicking, one might say, the artifice employed in gendering the female body. Or something like that. I was terribly, but gleefully, wrong.

Sarah Waters' book is not full of anachronistic reflections on the nature of the lesbian body (and twenty pages in, I even felt sort of silly for expecting them-- what did I think I'd get here? Judith Butler in a corset?) Rather, it is a thoroughly engaging picaresque novel, one which seems almost deliberately to eschew the kind of cheesily facile techniques lesser writers might have employed to better anchor their stories in the terra firma of historical fact.

Waters' protagonist, Nancy Astley, moves fairly smoothly between the worlds of the actor, the prostitute, the very rich, and the professional do-gooder, constantly adjusting her malleable albeit increasingly radical self along the way and only once or twice observing directly that her performances in real life aren't so dissimilar from those she takes on onstage. The reader keeps anticipating the arrival of some major figure from the world of notable queers to show up (Radclyffe Hall casually mentioning that she's just finished a little book she hopes will usher in a new era of understanding, perhaps) but Waters refrains-- her book carries on without props like these, and manages to evoke its chosen era without (especially) stilted dialogue or a superabundance of useless period factoids (we are spared, for example, a lengthy description of the details of housework in the last century, processes faithfully catalogued in another recent historical novel). The story is relentlessly plot-driven, and allows itself little time for its protagonist to reflect on the greater implications of her life and assorted lifestyles. At no point does she ponder for long the irony of her brief career as a male prostitute, or make much of the inherent conservatism of her consistently hausfrauish roles in her sexual relationships (she "dresses" her first love, the actor Kitty, and compulsively cleans her dressing room; later, she observes that she doesn't mind doing housework for Florence, her last partner, because, after all, she would do these things if she were Florence's wife)-- she's always too busy turning a trick or blacking a fireplace. Her lack of self-scrutiny makes her a more, not less, complex character; she's not a symbol of emergent lesbian identity, self-conscious or otherwise, but rather a woman looking for someone to accept and care for her.

It's a simple plot, but one which continues to compel, and by the end of the novel, as sappy as it sounds, the reader is cheering her on as she discovers that she is at last free of the spell of her first true love and able to love again. (And this is not a short book, let me note-- it takes Nancy well over 400 pages to find happiness.) Nancy's tone throughout the book, whether she is describing the bearding of an oyster (an image Waters slyly introduces and then wisely drops) or the stitching on her wealthy sadistic mistress' custom-designed leather strap-on, is simple and straightforward, unburdened on the whole by that slightly histrionic, mannered quality that characterizes the voice in so much historical fiction; her casual, frank discussion of her past (we do not know how old she is as she tells her story, but she hints at middle age) both naturalizes the sometimes freakish events (like all picaresques, the story is built on the improbable) and strips the narrative of irksome faux-Victorian fussiness. In short, while it's not hard to imagine Tipping the Velvet as a film, it's hard to see it as a Merchant/Ivory Helena Bonham-Carter vehicle, unless, perhaps, Gina Gershon played the lead, perhaps still in that undershirt she wore in Bound. I mean this, of course, as a compliment.

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