APPENDICES
Author’s Biography
SARAH WATERS
Chilhood
Sarah Waters was born i in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a sister. Her mother was a housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her father, "a fantastically creative person", encouraged her to build and invent.
and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic pastiches", but had not planned her career. Despite her obvious enjoyment of writing, she did not feel any special calling or preference for becoming a novelist in her youth. “ I don’t know if I thought about it much, really. I know that, for a long time, I
wanted to be an archaeologist – like lots of kids. And I think I knew I was headed for university, even though no one else in my family had been. I really enjoyed learning. I remember my mother telling me that I might one day go to university and write a thesis, and explaining what a thesis was; and it seemed a very exciting prospect. I was clearly a bit of a nerd. ”
Education
Afte English literature. She received a BA from the thesis, entitled Wolfskins and togas : lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to the present, served as inspiration and material for future books. As part of her research she read 19th-century pornography, in which she came across the title of her first book, classics of Victorian literature, such as and in the contemporary novelists that combine a keen interest in Victoriana with a post-modernist approach to fiction, especially 'Nights at the Circus' had a huge influence on her début novel as well, and Waters praises her for her literary prose, her "common touch", and her commitment to feminism.
Daily life
Waters lives in a top-floor Career
Before writing novels, Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching. Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the thesis was complete. Her work is very research-intensive, which is an aspect she enjoys. Waters was briefly a member of the long-running London North Writers circle, whose members have included the novelists others.
"common agenda in teasing out lesbian stories from parts of history that are regarded as quite heterosexual", she also calls her lesbian protagonists "incidental", due to her own sexual orientation. "That's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life."
Tipping the Velvet (1998)
Her debut work was the 1998. The novel took 18 months to write. The book takes its title from Victorian slang for
It won a 1999 Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
In 2002, the novel was adapted into a three-part television serial of the same name for Hungarian, Korean a
Affinity (1999)
Waters's sec also set in the finishing her spiritualism. She combined her interests in spiritualism, prisons, and the Victorian era in Affinity, which tells the story of the relationship between an upper middle-class woman and an imprisoned spiritualist.
The novel is less light-hearted than the ones that preceded and followed it. Waters found it less enjoyable to write. "It was a very gloomy world to have to go into every day", she said.
Affinity won the Affinity and the resulting feature film premiered 19 June 2008 at the opening night of the
Fingersmith (2002)
good quality show", and said it was "very faithful to the book. It was spookily faithful to the book at times, which was exciting."
The Night Watch (2006)
Main article
in its time period and its structure. Although her thesis and previous books focused on the 19th century, Waters said that "Something about the 1940s called to me".It was also less tightly plotted than her other books. Waters said,
“ I had more or less to figure the book out as I went along – a very time-consuming and unnerving experience for me, as I tried out scenes and chapters in lots of different ways. I ended up with a pile of rejected scenes about three feet high. It was satisfying in the end, realizing just what should go where; but a lot of the time it felt like a wrestling match. ” The novel tells the stories of a man and three women in 1940s London. Waters describes it as "fundamentally a novel about disappointment and loss and betrayal", as well as "real contact between people and genuine intimacy".
In 2005, Waters received the highest bid (£1,000) during a charity auction in which the prize was the opportunity to have the winner's name immortalised in The Night Watch. The auction featured many notable British novelists, and the name of the bidder, author
The Night Watch was adapted for television by BBC2 and broadcast on 12 July 2011.
The Little Stranger (2009)
Also set in the 1940s, The Little Stranger also differs from Waters' previous novels. It is her first with no overtly lesbian characters. Initially, Waters set out to write a book about the economic changes brought by socialism in postwar Britain, and reviewers note the connection wit story, focusing on a family of gentry who own a large country house they can no longer afford to maintain.
The Paying Guests (2014)
up the latter half of the book. The Observer said: "The inimitable Sarah Waters handles a dramatic key change with aplomb in her new novel set in 1920s south London". The Telegraph described it as "eerie, virtuoso writing".
Academic work
• Waters, S. (1994). "'A Girton Girl on a Throne': Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism, 1906-1933". Feminist Review (46): 41
• Waters, S. (1995). ""The Most Famous Fairy in History": Antinous and Homosexual Fantasy". Journal of the History of Sexuality6 (2): 194–230.
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(PhD thesis) Adaptations
Television
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Awards
Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta's 20 Best of Young British Writers in January 2003. The same year, she received the South Bank Award for Literature. She was named Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards "Writer of the Year" at the annual
Each of her novels has received awards as well.
Tipping the Velvet
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• Library Journal's Best Book of the Year, 1999
• New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award, 1999
• Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction (shortlist), 2000
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Affinity
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Award), 2000
• Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award (shortlist), 2000
• Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, 2000
• Lambda Literary Award for Fiction (shortlist), 2000
• Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (shortlist), 2000
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• The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japa
Fingersmith
• British Book Awards Author of the Year, 2002
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• The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japa
The Night Watch
• Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
• Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2006
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The Little Stranger
• Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist), 2009
• Nominee for
The Paying Guests
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Part One
Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in 'a Fagin-like den of thieves' by her adoptive mother, Mrs. Sucksby, is sent to help Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers seduce a wealthy heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to gain the trust of the lady, Maud Lilly, and eventually persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married, Gentleman plans to commit Maud to a madhouse and claim her fortune for himself.
Sue travels to Briar, Maud's secluded home in the country, where she lives a sheltered life under the care of her uncle, Christopher Lilly. Like Sue, Maud was orphaned at birth; her mother died in a mental asylum, and she has never known her father. Her uncle uses her as a secretary to assist him in compiling an Index of Erotica, and keeps her to the house, working with him in the silence of his library.
Sue and Maud forge an unlikely friendship, which develops into a mutual physical passion; after a time, Sue realizes she has fallen in love with Maud, and begins to regret her involvement in Gentleman's plot. Deeply distressed, but feeling she has no choice, Sue persuades Maud to marry Gentleman, and the trio flee from Briar to a nearby church, where Maud and Gentleman are hastily married in a midnight ceremony.
Making a temporary home in a local cottage, and telling Maud they are simply waiting for their affairs to be brought to order in London, Gentleman and a reluctant Sue make arrangements for Maud to be committed to an asylum for the insane; her health has already waned as a result of the shock of leaving her quiet life at Briar, to Gentleman's delight.
After a week, he and Sue escort an oblivious Maud to the asylum in a closed carriage. However, the doctors apprehend Sue on arrival, and from the cold reactions of Gentleman and the seemingly innocent Maud, Sue guesses that it is she who has been conned: "That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start."
Part Two
In the second part of the novel, Maud takes over the narrative. She describes her early life being raised by the nurses in the mental asylum where her mother died, and the sudden appearance of her uncle, who arrives when she is eleven to take her to Briar to be his secretary.
Shockingly, Maud reveals that her uncle's work is not to compile a dictionary, but to assemble a bibliography of literary pornography, for the reference of future generations. In his own words, Christopher Lilly is a 'curator of poisons.' He introduces Maud to the keeping of the books—indexing them and such—when she is barely twelve, and deadens her reactions to the shocking material. As she grows older, Maud reads the material aloud for the appreciation of her uncle's colleagues. On one occasion, when asked by one of them how she can stand to curate such things, Maud answers, "I was bred to the task, as servants are."
She has resigned herself to a life serving her uncle's obscure ambition when Richard Rivers arrives at Briar. He reveals to her a plan to help her escape her exile in Briar, a plan involving the deception of a commonplace girl who will believe she has been sent to Briar to trick Maud out of her inheritance. After initial hesitation, Maud agrees to the plan and receives Sue weeks later, pretending to know nothing about the plot.
Maud falls in love with Sue over time and, like Sue, begins to question whether she will be able to carry out Gentleman's plot as planned. Though overcome with guilt, Maud does, and travels with Gentleman t claiming to the doctors that Sue was the mad Mrs Maud Rivers who believed she was a commonplace girl.
Instead of taking Maud to a house i takes her to Mrs. Sucksby in the Borough. It was, it turns out, Gentleman's plan to bring her here all along; and, Mrs. Sucksby, who had orchestrated the entire plan, reveals to a stunned Maud that a lady, Marianne Lilly, had come t earlier, pregnant and alone. When Marianne discovered her cruel father and brother had found her, she begged Mrs. Sucksby to take her newborn child and give her one of her 'farmed' infants to take its place.
Sue, it turns out, was Marianne Lilly's true daughter, and Maud one of the many orphaned infants who had been placed on Mrs. Sucksby's care after being abandoned. Marianne revises her will on the night of the switch, entitling each of the two girls to half of Marianne Lilly's fortune. By having Sue committed, Mrs. Sucksby could intercept one share; by keeping Maud a prisoner, she could take the other half. She had planned the switch of the two girls for seventeen years, and enlisted the help of Gentleman to bring Maud to her in the weeks before Sue's eighteenth birthday, when she would become legally entitled to the money. By setting Sue up as the 'mad Mrs. Rivers', Gentleman could, by law, claim her fortune for himself.
Part three
The novel resumes Sue's narrative, picking up where Maud and Gentleman had left her in the mental asylum. Sue is devastated at Maud's betrayal and furious that Gentleman double-crossed her. When she screams to the asylum doctors that she is not Mrs. Rivers but her maid Susan, they ignore her, as Gentleman (helped by Maud) has convinced them that this is precisely her delusion, and that she is really Maud Lilly Rivers, his troubled wife.
Sue is treated appallingly by the nurses in the asylum, being subjected to beatings and taunts on a regular basis. Such is her maltreatment and loneliness that, after a time, she begins to fear that she truly has gone mad. She is sustained by the belief that Mrs. Sucksby will find and rescue her. Sue dwells on Maud's betrayal, the devastation of which quickly turns to anger.
Sue's chance at freedom comes when Charles, a knife boy from Briar, comes to visit her. He is the nephew, it turns out, of the local woman (Mrs Cream) who owned the cottage the trio had stayed in on the night of Maud and Gentleman's wedding. Charles, a simple boy, had been pining for the charming attentions of Gentleman to such an extent that Mr Way, the warden of Briar, had begun to beat him severely. Charles ran away, and had been directed to the asylum by Mrs Cream, who had no idea of the nature of the place.
Sue quickly enlists his help in her escape, persuading him to purchase a blank key and a file to give to her on his next visit. This he does, and Sue, using the skills learnt growing up in the Borough, escapes from the asylum and travels with Charles to London, with the intention of returning to Mrs. Sucksby and her home in Lant Street.
