Tipping the Velvet is a 1998 debut novel by Welsh novelist Sarah Waters. A historical novel set in England during the 1890s, it tells a coming-of-age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator, follows her to London, and finds various ways to support herself as she journeys through the city. The picaresque plot elements have prompted scholars and reviewers to compare it to similar British urban adventure stories written by Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe.
The novel has pervasive lesbian themes, concentrating on eroticism and self-discovery. Waters was working on a PhD dissertation in English literature when she decided to write a story she would like to read. Employing her love for the variety of people and districts in London, she consciously chose an urban setting. As opposed to previous lesbian-themed fiction she had read where the characters escape an oppressive society to live apart from it, Waters chose characters who interact with their surroundings. The book becomes a fictionalized account of lesbian relationships from that era. The main character's experiences in the theatrical profession and her perpetual motion through the city allow her to make observations on social conditions while exploring the issues of gender, sexism, and class difference.
Waters' first novel, it was highly acclaimed and was chosen by The New York Times and The Library Journal as one of the best books of 1998. Reviewers commented that Tipping the Velvet employs humour, adventure, and sexual explicitness to great effect. The novel was adapted into a three-part television series by the BBC in 2002.
Inspiration and publication
When Sarah Waters was 19 years old, she joined a student house in Whitstable, Kent, sharing a bed and then falling in love with another young woman. They lived there for two winters in what became a six-year relationship. She recalled, "It was cold, isolated, romantic and so intense—quite special."McCrum, Robert (10 May 2009). "What Lies Beneath: Ghosts, Gothic horror, lesbians, poltergeists, female hysteria... There are hidden depths to Sarah Waters...", The Observer (England), p. 20. In 1995, Waters was at Queen Mary and Westfield College writing her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction from 1870 onward when she became interested in the Victorian era. While learning about the activism in socialism, women's suffrage, and utopianism of the period, she was inspired to write a work of fiction of the kind that she would like to read. Specifically, Waters intended to write a story that focused on an urban setting, diverging from previous lesbian-themed books such as Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah, in which two women escape an oppressive home life to live together freely in the woods. She said to herself at the time, "there's so much more to lesbian history than that".Seajay, Carole (Spring 2006). "Sarah Waters". Lambda Book Report, pp. 4–5.Stockwell, Anne (22 June 1999). "Sarah Waters: Tipping the Velvet", The Advocate, p. 124.
Waters was drawn to the Victorian era because of the (mis)understandings of what social norms existed during the period. As she stated, "I find it a fascinating period because it feels very close to us, and yet in lots of ways it is utterly strange: many of the things we think we know about it are stereotypes, or simply wrong". Considering herself part of gay and lesbian literary heritage, Waters was influenced by Oscar Wilde, and Chris Hunt, who wrote Street Lavender, an historical novel with gay male themes also set in the Victorian era. She has stated that Tipping the Velvet is a female version of Street Lavender, with a plot similar to My Secret Life by "Walter".Taylor, Debbie (2004), ‘Sarah Waters’, MsLexia 20, pp. 15–17.
Waters pitched Tipping the Velvet to ten British publishers, but after they all rejected it, she began considering American publishing houses. Although she was picked up quickly by a literary agency, the agent spent almost a year trying to sell the book to a mainstream publisher. By the time Tipping the Velvet was accepted by Virago Press—one of the ten that had previously passed on the project—Waters had already begun work on her second novel.
Plot Nancy "Nan" Astley is a sheltered 18-year-old living with her working-class family and helping in their oyster restaurant in Whitstable, Kent. She becomes instantly and desperately enamoured with a "masher", or male impersonator, named Kitty Butler, who performs for a season at the local theatre. They begin a friendship that grows when, after Kitty finds an opportunity to perform in London for better exposure, she asks Nan to join her. Nan enthusiastically agrees and leaves her family to act as Kitty's dresser while she performs. Although Kitty and Nan acknowledge their relationship to be sisterly, Nan continues to love Kitty until a jealous fight forces Kitty to admit she feels the same, although she insists that they keep their relationship secret. Simultaneously, Kitty's manager Walter decides that Kitty needs a performing partner to reach true success, and suggests Nan for the role. Nan is initially horrified by the idea, but takes to it. The duo become quite famous until Nan realises she is homesick after being gone from her family for more than a year. Her return home is underwhelming, so she returns to London early to find Kitty in bed with Walter. They announce that the act is finished and they are to be married.
Astonished and deeply bruised by the discovery, Nan wanders the streets of London, finally holing herself in a filthy boarding house for weeks in a state of madness until her funds run out. After spying the male costumes she took as her only memory of her time with Kitty, Nan begins to walk the streets of London as a man and easily passes. She is solicited by a man for sex and begins renting, but dressed only as a man for male clients, never letting them know she is a woman. She meets a socialist activist named Florence who lives near the boarding house, but before she can get to know her, Nan is hired by a wealthy widow with licentious tastes named Diana. Although realising—and initially enjoying—that she is an object to Diana and her friends, Nan stays with her for over a year as "Neville", dressed in the finest men's clothes Diana can afford. The relationship erodes, however, and Diana throws Nan into the streets.
Nan stumbles through London searching for Florence, whom she eventually finds; Florence is now melancholy, however, and has a child. Nan stays with Florence and her brother Ralph, working as their housekeeper. Nan and Florence grow closer during the year they live together, and Nan learns that the previous boarder with Florence and Ralph had a child and died shortly after giving birth. Florence was deeply in love with the boarder but her affections were not returned. During an outing to a women's pub, Nan is recognised by former fans, to Florence's astonishment, and Nan divulges her own spotty past to Florence. Cautiously, they begin a love affair. Putting her theatrical skills to use, Nan assists Ralph in preparing a speech at an upcoming socialist rally. At the event Nan jumps onstage to help Ralph when he falters, and is noticed once more by Kitty, who asks her to come back so they can continue their affair in secret. Realising how much shame Kitty continues to feel, how much of herself was compromised during their affair, and that her truest happiness is where she is now, Nan turns Kitty away and joins Florence.
Literary elements
Style
The greatest literary strengths in Tipping the Velvet, according to reviewers and literary scholars, are the vibrant portrayal of the districts and streets of London, and Waters' ability to create sympathetic and realistic characters. Her use of synaesthesia in lush descriptions particularly interested Harriet Malinowitz in The Women's Review of Books. For example, Malinowitz cites the scene when Nan first meets Kitty, removing her glove to shake Kitty's hand. Very much an oyster girl, Nan's hands are covered with "those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had ceased, entirely, to notice them". Nan is mortified that she smells like a herring, but Kitty assuages her fears, kissing her hand and telling her she instead smells like a mermaid.Waters, p. 33. Malinowitz includes this and other descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells in Victorian London as examples of elements that are "breathlessly and wittily detailed".Malinowitz, Harriet (February 2000). "Review: Taking the Road to Ruin", The Women's Review of Books, 17 (5), p. 11.
Although Waters was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales, she considers herself a London writer because of her intense affection for the city, due in part to her immigration to it. Specifically, Waters is moved by walking through London and seeing remnants of many historical eras: "It's ... almost like it's peopled with ghosts—again, jostling up against each other or passing through each other. I find that very exciting".Armitt, Lucy (2007). "Interview with Sarah Waters (CWWN conference, University of Wales, Bangor, 22 April 2006)", Feminist Review 85, pp. 116–127. Her love for the city is apparent to many reviewers. In the Lesbian Review of Books Donna Allegra writes, "[S]he summons the era's attitudes and ambiance projecting them onto the screen of the reader's mind with Dolby wrap-around sound such that you feel you're vacationing on all points between Chelsea and the East End".Allegra, Donna (Spring 2001). "Embroidering Life", Lesbian Review of Books, 7 (3), p. 21.
Miranda Seymour in The New York Times remarks on the "breathless passion" of the narrator's voice as being absolutely convincing, citing as an example Nancy's statement to her sister at the start of the book about why she continues to visit Kitty Butler:... It's like I never saw anything at all before. It's like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it's filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing—they're like dust. Then she walks on the stage and—she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once... I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her.Waters, p. 20.
Donna Allegra and Christina Patterson in The Observer also praise Nan as a passionate and captivating character. Patterson and Mel Steel in The Independent compare her resourcefulness to that of Moll Flanders. Of her three Victorian-set novels, Waters uses humour and "an attractive lightness of touch" most effectively in Tipping the Velvet, according to Paulina Palmer. Nan the narrator describes the irony of her "curious gaslit career" as a rent-boy only to end up—in Diana's words—as her "tart". Waters had such fun writing the novel that she told Robert McCrum from The Observer in 2009 that if she had no obligations to meet stemming from her subsequent success as a writer that she would continue writing Nan's story.
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