Tipping the Velvet

After weeks of trying to find the time, I've finally finished Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet, a picaresque romp through gay Victorian life.

On a chance visit to the theatre in Canterbury, Nancy Astley, an eighteen year-old oyster girl, falls head over heels in love with Kitty Butler, a music hall artiste with a line as a male impersonator. When Kitty is offered a contract to work in London, Nancy manages to persuade her parents to let her go and the two women head off in search of fame and fortune. After months of tiptoeing round each other, they finally realise that each is in love with the other and embark on an affair.

On the run from Kitty, Nancy sets herself up in a rooming house and, simple to avoid being hassled by gents in the street, dons her male drag so that she can pass unbothered as a boy. But her disguise is too good and she soon finds herself picked up by a man in search of a boy for hire, at this marks her entry into a demi-monde of mary-annes and renters and gay girls and their patrons. After plying the trade for months, she unexpectedly finds herself accosted by a woman in a carriage who knows Nancy to be a girl, but is still keen to set her up as a kept woman. After months in the company of the dissipated Diana Leatherby, dressing as a boy and attending to her every whim, things go horribly wrong and Nancy finds herself on the street with no possessions and no money.

Finding herself utterly alone, Nancy happens to remember a chance encounter with a woman, Florence, from a rehousing charity and resolves to ask for help. At first, Florence isn't at all keen, but Nan decides to set herself up as housekeeper to Flo and her brother, Ralph, allowing them time to concentrate on helping to organise unions and work for the cause of socialism and the two gradually settle into a friendship. Then, on a night out at the pub, some of Florence's friends recognise Nancy as a music hall star — and lesbian pin-up girl! — causing the two women to realise that they've actually managed to fall in love with each other.

I really enjoyed Tipping the Velvet, although I think I secretly preferred the gothic gloom of its successor novels, Affinity and Fingersmith, but that's just me. The novel was particularly strong on place and character, and I very much enjoyed the squalor of late Victorian London, with patina of moral rectitude and its underbelly of rent boys and their louche upper class customers. I also thought that Nancy was wonderfully realised, from her origins as a romantic working class girl through her role as Diana's beautiful but dim (as Diana keeps on asserting, in contradiction to the evidence) mistress, to her final incarnation as a not-quite socialist, she was a consistently charming companion and narrator.