Product Description

Nan is captivated by the music hall phenomenon that is Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they start an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10181 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 472 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.

Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending pal, all but her sister, best friend, and bedmate, Alice, "her eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion". Not to worry. Soon Nancy and Kitty are off to London, their relationship close though (alas for our heroine) sisterly. We know that bliss will come, and it does, in an exceptionally charged moment. A lesser author would have been content to stop her story there, but Waters has much more in mind for her buttonholing heroine, and for us. In brief, her Everywoman with a sexual difference goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement. And did I mention her long stint as a plaything in the pleasure palace of a rich Sapphist extraordinaire? Diana Lethaby is as cruel as she is carnal, and even the well- concealed Cavendish Ladies' Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. "We are here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular."

Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long. --Kerry Fried, Amazon.com

Review
'An unstoppable read, a sexy and picaresque romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaring Nineties. Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel?' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A delightful novel which sets a new standard for lesbian historical fiction, and should entice new readers to the genre' EMMA DONOGHUE

It is the late 19th century, and Nancy is a girl from an honest Whitstable oyster-selling family whose head is turned by a visit to the local music hall. There she watches, night after night, a song and dance routine by Kitty Butler, a girl not much older than herself who dresses as a boy. Her obsession deepens and awakens sexual feelings she can neither express nor deny, so when Kitty befriends her and asks her to travel to London with her as her dresser, she accepts immediately. What follows are the next five years of Nancy's life her passionate love for Kitty, Kitty's betrayal of that love, and the slow working through of her despair and grief. The journey takes Nancy through the lowest depravities of the London sex scene, where she earns her living for a while as a rent 'boy', to the luxury of being the private toy of a wealthy lesbian with outlandish tastes and expensive habits. The pain of losing Kitty never goes, even as her experiences harden her, and this is as much a book about the agony of growing out of a lost first love and finding something to replace it, as it is a historical picture of the sleaziest aspects of life in Victorian London. It is erotic and sometimes explicit but Nancy's feelings, or numb lack of them, are always the point. She eventually finds both love and work which will use her talents constructively, but it's a tortuous and sometimes hopeless-seeming route. Sarah Waters writes without hitting a wrong note. The historical detail and the outlandish vocabulary are an education in themselves, brought to life through a variety of convincingly individual characters. Reading the first sentence, you know you will be captivated until the very end. It's a gripping and memorable ride. (Kirkus UK)

Echoes of Tom Jones, Great Expectations, and anonymous confessional pornography resound throughout this richly entertaining first novel from England: the picaresque tale of its lesbian heroine's progress through several levels of both polite and refreshingly impolite Victorian society. Nancy Astley has been plucked away from her close-knit family of fishmongers in seaside Whitstable and whisked off to London as (unofficial) "dresser" to music-hall entertainer Kitty Butler - "the girl what dresses up as a feller" and the first love of stagestruck Nancy's young life. Before she's 20, she's become the coquettish Kitty's lover and also her stage partner, "fellow" male impersonator "Nan King." All is bliss until Kitty protects her reputation by escaping into marriage, and the abandoned Nancy finds work posing as a male street prostitute (or "renter") and undergoing undreamt-of sexual permutations and indignities as the girl/boytoy of lustful widow Diana Lethaby (at the latter's posh mansion, Felicity Place, and among jaded members of the militantly sapphic Cavendish Club) before seeking, losing, then reclaiming tree love with selfless "charity visitor" Florence Banner and finding her own voice as a fledgling Socialist. Marred only by a jerry-rigged conclusion in which the repentant Kitty is in effect punished for having concealed her sexuality, Waters's debut offers terrific entertainment: swiftly paced, crammed with colorful depictions of 1890s London and vividly sketched Dickensian supporting characters (Nancy's kindly parents recall the genial fisherfolk of David Copperfield), pulsating with highly charged (and explicitly presented) erotic heat. And Nancy's conflicted feelings - between the "desperate pleasures" to which she's drawn and her equally strong desire to become "a regular girl . . . again" - are quite movingly delineated. A perfect fictional equivalent to such eye-opening standard works as Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and Steven Marcus's The Other Victorians - and a rather formidable debut. (Kirkus Reviews)

DAILY TELEGRAPH
'This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson'

Customer Reviews

Lip Bitingly good
My Sarah waters virginity was lost with "Fingersmith" (which i adored), so i naturally moved onto Tipping the Velvet. Unlike Fingersmith, there is only one character to focus on. Not that this was a bad thing however; in fact it made the book more intense. You could completly induldge in Nans thoughts, feelings, experiences and heart break. It was a deliciously smooth read which i found impossible to put down and shall re-read over an over. If you want to give your mind something to devour, then let it be Tipping the Velvet. You wont be dissapointed.

I feel I grew up with these two young women
By Mr. W. Dover "aspiring nobody" (Duesseldorf, Germany) - See all my reviews


This story just takes you right inside the lives of two young women living in Victorian England. These central characters are both experiencing so many new things in their lives, yet they gradually find that they have fundamentally different motives and desires. Either they are greedy for admiration and fame, or they are falling in love for the first time.

Like Sarah Waters' more recent novel "The Night Watch", this book is tragic, but with comic moments and as such I think it a masterwork. Classical in its overarching themes of "coming out of the Garden of Eden" (and no pun intended about Coming out), or coming to terms with the world, it sweeps you along with the journey of the characters. Everything the women experience affects the reader in a way that cannot be described. As a male reader, not aware of any particular preconceptions, I watched & loved the TV series, then had to read the book (albeit several years later though).

A element common to great works of fiction, surely, is that the reader shares the emotions of the central protagonists, for better or worse, along the course of the story. And that's exactly what I found whilst reading this tale. Regardless of sex, or sexual persuasion "Tipping the Velvet" pulls you in and doesn't let go. "Unputtdownable" is a term much overused these days. Whatever your opinion on that, I recommend that if you enjoy historical fiction or not; if you identify with idealistic yet reckless (to use one of Waters' favourite words) heroines or not; if you can't abide people who use others according to their own whims and fancies, or if you find that irrelevant; if you want to escape into another time and place as if you never knew any other life; in short, if you are fond of books that enthrall and entrance, then this is the one for you.

I cannot emphasise enough how deeply this book moved me. It makes you want to go and dance on the stage, like the women do. A wonderful, fulfilling and uplifting story. Ultimately life-enhancing.

A good read
It's reputation as a Victorian lesbian bodice ripper having preceded it, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Tipping the Velvet. I needn't have worried - it is an extremely well written book, which drew me into the story and kept me intrigued from the very start.

The main topic of the story is lesbianism in the 1890s, and as such it is pretty graphic at many points. Therefore readers who are upset by homosexuality or descriptive sex scenes of any kind should avoid this book. However, it is very well written with a strong cast of interesting characters and plenty of twists and turns in the plot.

I did feel that the story lost some of its momentum in parts 2 and 3, but it was still enjoyable and didn't drag. The ending worked well, and I was left feeling pleased I'd given the book a chance. I would recommend this to any reader over 16, as long as they aren't worried by the sex scenes.