Photograph: Sam Jones
Sarah Waters in London, April 2009

Sarah Waters

By Robert McCrum
The Observer, May 10, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Sarah Waters lives in a pretty little Victorian terrace in south London, an easy walk from the Imperial War Museum. She has freckled white skin, an almost boyish smile and a floppy haircut. It's hard to believe she is 43.

Sarah Waters first attracted attention with Tipping the Velvet, a title derived from Victorian slang for cunnilingus, in 1998. Waters merrily characterised the work as "a lesbo historical romp". She has now disowned this saucy phrase, but it inflamed a generation of headline writers and set her on course. Her second novel, Affinity (1999), was darker and weirder.

Waters' breakthrough into the mainstream came in 2002 with Fingersmith (Victorian slang for a pickpocket, and also a midwife). Fidelis Morgan, who writes the Countess Ashby de la Zouche series, said, "Fingersmith is an intoxicating novel with a twist so astonishing it made me gasp aloud." The novelist Philip Hensher says she has made "a great link between the secrecy of queer sexualities and the secrets and revelations of the Gothic tradition."

From 2002 to 2006, she struggled with her most ambitious novel to date, The Night Watch, a haunting love story set in wartime and postwar London. Her father was only a boy then, but had memories of firewatching with his father. Her mother had tales of the RAF in wartime Wales. As a child, says Waters, she was "a real tomboy" who "had a lot of guns and really wanted to be a commando". She would dash about with comic-book cries of "Achtung!" and "Schnell! Schnell!" She remembers her father encouraging her to make Airfix models of Heinkels, Spitfires and Lancasters.

Waters says she got the idea for her latest novel, The Little Stranger, while working on the postwar sections of The Night Watch. The Little Stranger (the title is a Victorian euphemism for "an unborn child") is a ghost story set in austerity Britain. Waters is worried that the absence of lesbians will disappoint her fans.

Waters recalls reading widely as a child, "but nothing memorable", and watching "an awful lot of telly, sci-fi, horror and Doctor Who". As a teenager, she says, she moved from her tomboy days to a "girly phase" in which "it was a relief to feel I could date boys". Provincial Wales discouraged explorations of sexual identity. She says she was always interested in homosexuality, but thought of herself as bisexual - "I just liked the idea."

Literature didn't come into the picture until she took "a fairly old-fashioned English course" at the university of Kent. She fell in love with another girl, Kate, sharing a single bed for two "wonderfully memorable" freezing winters by the sea. "It was cold, isolated, romantic and so intense - quite special," she remembers. "We were together for six years."

Waters went on to take an MA at Lancaster, and then a PhD at Queen Mary's, London. Waiting for news about an academic grant, she began to write Tipping the Velvet. She says that her ambitions for her first novel came from her doctoral work on the idea of history in lesbian and gay writing.

Waters' life in sunny Lambeth is discreet, unassuming and contented. She lives with two cats and a partner of seven years. She is very practical and matter-of-fact about writing. "I treat it like a job. I normally write Monday to Friday, in working hours. I like a nice long day, I can't work in bits and pieces, and I prefer not to work at evenings or weekends."
 

AR  I recall Robert McCrum from the years 1977/78, when we were both young unknowns in southwest London. He let me read the draft typescript of his first novel.