Tipping The Velvet by Sarah Waters

My rating: ★★★★★

This is something else.

Enter a world of sapphic love and desire featuring Nancy (loosely inspired by Zola’s Nana), Kitty the “masher”, Diana the huntress, a gently blossoming Florence, and a flurry of lesser yet equally entertaining characters.

The tantalising story of Nancy Astley unfolds from her youth as an oyster-girl in Whitstable to her discovery of lesbian love, lust, and pleasure in late 19th century London.

The capricious and frivolous nature of Nancy belies the importance of her journey. She fumbles and falls trying to define herself, running from the past at break-neck speed, while at the same time hiding her present like a precious jewel never to be spoiled. But the present inevitably passes, and the past never truly is passed.

Sometimes lubricious, always brave, and often risqué, the style, with slang in all the right places, and queers and gays and toms, has an almost poetic ring to it. It conjures up people and whole scenes in vivid colours, or browns and greys.

This book made me laugh and cry, and feel, and remember, and think, and look at myself in the then and now. This was certainly a necessary novel at the time it came out (ha!); I would have found it irresistible and scandalous had I read it then, and I thoroughly enjoyed it two decades on.

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