Sarah Waters’ novels are highly visual, with a painterly quality; she creates each scene with vivid, memorable detail. It’s no surprise that five of her novels have been filmed and the last one is under option and will be filmed soon.
Sarah is also deftly brilliant at dialogue (the script is almost written for the filmmakers!), using it sparingly to create characters … and such characters. So many novelists resort to signposting their protagonists in quick and obvious ways using clothes, accents, class etc. But Sarah builds her people from scratch; she invents and invests them with such care, attention and love even that it’s no wonder people carry them in their hearts and minds long after they close the novel. After Tipping the Velvet was published, women used the names of her two lovers in the small ads (as they were then) as code: ‘I am Nan looking for my Florence’.
We know that first novel came out of her PhD on the history of lesbian and gay writing. The concern and passion to put queer lives and loves at the centre of her novels has remained, and her readers – of all sexual orientations – adore her for it. So much so that when she didn’t have a queer character in The Little Stranger, readers theorised that ‘the character of the house must be gay’. Maybe it is! She has said herself that Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were about her search for an identity as a lesbian writer and undoubtedly she has been a leading part of the literary and artistic world that has brought queerness from the margins to the centre. From the beginning of her career, she has nourished her readers, so many of whom still write to tell her how she has given them courage – and joy. She proves to me, over and over again, that books can change lives.
A beguiling author, a wonderful woman and a generous writer, Sarah Waters is an absolute joy to work with and not least because she holds readers close to her heart. I read again an interview she did many years ago and see that the interviewer was pushing for her writer’s credo. Laughing, she says, slightly cheekily and knowingly too, ‘What I’m after is a gripping read … with stuff going on behind it.’ How gripping! And what ‘stuff ’!
As one of her reviewers said … ‘If you haven’t yet read Sarah Waters, I actually envy you the pleasure to come.’