Recommendations from our site
“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.” Read more...
The Best Feminist Books: 50 Years of Virago Press
Sarah Savitt, Publisher
“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.” Read more...
Rosie Wilby, Comedians & Humorist
“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.” Read more...
Vanora Bennett, Historical Novelist
