Profile of Sarah Waters
Extract from the profile of Sarah Waters, by Heidi Amsinck, which appears in issue 2 of The Mechanics' Institute Review.
Cutting a long story short
Sarah Waters is the academic who has brought, in her own words, 'lesbian Victorian romps' to a mainstream audience with the much-loved Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), the last of which was shortlisted three years ago for the Man Booker and Orange prizes.
In the early 1990s, while researching for her Ph.D. in English Literature, Sarah Waters - named in 2003 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists - concluded that, on the whole, fictional representations of the lesbian past had hitherto been disappointingly narrow and frankly 'quite awful'. She thought she could do a lot better and, to wide critical acclaim, she has. Both Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were turned into successful and ground-breaking adaptations for the BBC. However, still afraid of being revealed as a fraud and eager to set herself challenges to test how much of a writer she really is, Sarah Waters, a former bookshop assistant, library worker and Open University lecturer, has set her fourth novel around much more mature lesbian relationships in the 1940s. And although imagining lesbian history remains her passion, she doesn't rule out writing non-lesbian or even present-day fiction in future. It all depends on the stories that turn up along the way.
Patience and perseverance - a writer's journey
She is the best-selling, award-winning, Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author of three novels that have brought lesbian historical fiction to a mainstream, worldwide audience, yet, amazingly, 39-year-old Sarah Waters is only just beginning to see herself as a proper writer.
'For a long time I didn't really feel like a novelist, but more like an academic who'd strayed into writing fiction, which is exactly what I was. I had this image of what a proper writer is: someone who has written since childhood, someone who's very driven to write and can take on any subject and turn it into a book. And that hadn't been my experience of writing at all.'
Sarah Waters is as unpretentious, down-to-earth and charming as the Georgian attic flat in Kennington, South London, that she shares with her two cats. (Her longterm girlfriend has her own flat around the corner.) The low-ceilinged rooms are cosy, colourful and lined with books. In the study, where she spends much of her time, a big map of London - the rich setting for all her novels so far - is plastered across one wall. It's clear the instant you meet her that a big part of Sarah Waters - a slim, younglooking blonde dressed casually in jeans and hooded top - still finds it hard to believe all that's happened.
'I think I have a horror of taking the whole thing too seriously. That's why some people think I'm too laid back about my writing. But essentially I see what I do as a craft, a job, a piece of work. There's not much mystery in it.' For her, becoming a writer has been a long, wonderful and surprising journey, but never an easy one and occasionally downright torturous, as she laughingly admits. 'It's a question of patience and perseverance.'
Profile of Sarah Waters © Heidi Amsinck, 2005