Her second novel, Affinity (1999), was darker and weirder, exuding a distinctive sensuality that propelled her heroine Margaret Prior into another transgressive new world of seances and spiritualism. She has now disowned this saucy phrase, but it inflamed a generation of headline writers and set her on course for the deviant heart of Middle England. Waters herself merrily stoked her readership by characterising her early work as "a lesbo historical romp". Perhaps not since Daphne du Maurier has a popular young woman writer so captivated the literary world, metropolitan critics as much as book clubs. This infectious debut, a lesbian Rake's Progress through a fin-de-siècle underworld of "Mary Anns", "mashers" and "Toms", announced the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller with that high-low appeal which often characterises the natural bestseller. Sarah Waters, a name that might have come straight from the pages of a novel by Dickens or Wells, first attracted attention with Tipping the Velvet, a title derived from Victorian slang for cunnilingus, barely 10 years ago in 1998. With the publication of her fifth novel, The Little Stranger, Waters is now quite at home in the world of books and seems astonishingly well-adjusted for a writer whose rise has been swift and apparently effortless. Her conversation, too, is plain, guileless and natural. When she opens the door in jeans and sneakers and shows you up the bare wooden stairs to her cluttered first-floor kitchen, there is none of that disconnect you can sometimes feel on meeting a writer whose airbrushed image adorns her many paperbacks: Ms Waters is exactly like her photographs, with freckled white skin, an almost boyish, slightly wary, smile and that floppy child star's haircut. It's an address that seems perfect for her, and the absolute rightness of things in Waters's world is reinforced on first meeting, one sunny afternoon at the beginning of spring. Sarah Waters lives in a pretty little Victorian terrace in south London not far from a courthouse and the Imperial War Museum.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |