Verbal Magazine

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters epitomises everything that’s quintessentially, quirkily British. So much so, that I have interrupted her lunch of fish and chips (with tarter sauce and tea), for the purpose of this interview.

‘You want some chips? They’re really good,’ she beckons. Waters is riding high at the minute, with last year’s film based on her second novel Affinity, following hard on the heels of BBC adaptations of her first and third books: Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Becoming a novelist was never a lifelong ambition for Waters, who became a writer almost by accident, while finishing a PhD on gay and lesbian historical fiction at Queen Mary University London.
While many writers argue that academia is the curse of creative output, Waters says it gave her a certain discipline to sit at a desk for eight hours a day and write.
‘I started writing fiction after I completed a PhD thesis in 1995, I had never thought of becoming an author before that. I felt the PhD was great training for becoming a writer. With my PhD I could be very creative, so it was a very liberating experience – writing fiction then became even more liberating, because I could use my imagination.’

If Charles Dickens or Wilkie Collins has a ghost looming in the 21st Century, Waters could claim to at least have befriended them – she makes no bones about her fondness for the great literary tradition of British writing. Her latest novel: The Little Stranger, is her fifth, and her second set in post war Britain. The three previous novels, Affinity, Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, were set in the Victorian era.
While she can never be accused of starting an avant garde movement in British writing, Waters makes no apologies for using the past as a creative tool to craft her work from.
‘History seems to just inspire my writing. I just love the past, because it’s so radically different from the present and you don’t have to go back very far for things to look very different. Looking at the past makes you realise how history moves and how we’re always in a state of process and how things are changing - it’s not for me a retreat from the present or anything like that, its kind of complementary to look at the past, she says.
Research is as important as the writing itself, says Waters. It’s obvious that immersing herself in the world she is writing about is an inspiring part of the process. With The Little Stranger that meant trips to the British National Library to read various diaries from the era, and immersing herself in the films of the 1940s, which she admits to being a huge fan of.
Although previous novels have courted some controversy with their sympathetic portrayal of Lesbians and same sex relationships, The Little Stranger sees Waters take a new direction, writing from the perspective of a leading male character for the first time in her literary career. Was this change something that Waters was acutely aware of when she was writing the protagonist of Dr Faraday, in The Little Stranger?

She confesses that she wanted to break the mould of writing from the perspective of a female character, but says, even writing from a woman’s point of view, possesses its own difficulties. ‘Just because a narrator is female, doesn’t mean that I necessarily have that much in common with them, you always have to make that imaginative jump into someone else’s mind, that’s part of your job as a writer. I have written characters that have had nothing in common with me - but I think with most characters, there may be bits of me written in them. I suppose, it’s really about trying to find points of identification with characters- some things will just feel really familiar, it’s a real mixture that works I suppose.’
While the creation of the welfare state after the second world war may have been the dawn of modern Britain for much of the working class, for many of the middle and upper classes, it was a catastrophic fall from grace, whereby the notion of permanent class structures were eroded, leaving many with a serious crisis of identity. True to the cannon of British literary tradition, Waters admits, class is one of the most prevalent themes in her latest novel.
‘Class has always been a big issue in British culture and I think that’s what took me to the 40s in the first place, that sense that the war had shaken the class system. Britain had come out of the war and voted a Labour Government in, which was really exciting for some people, but I think for people like the Ayres family, in The Little Stranger, it was a catastrophe- it was in a sense an end of things for a lot of people and a start of a new class system for other people. I think Dr Faraday is caught between these two sides, he has allegiance in both directions.”

You get a sense from Waters that her writerly allegiances lie, perhaps, with the struggling middle classes, rather than with any notion of a revolutionary, politically active, working class. Talk of politics doesn’t last long – and when it does, it’s more to do with a romantic notion of a Britain that does not exist any more. I speculate that this is one of the reasons her novels are set in a world far removed from the political correctness of the 21st century. However she insists it was merely the tension inherent in the situation that appealed. ‘I think the concept of Britain throwing away the empire in the late 1940s was something traumatic for upper middle class people of the time: Britain was really going down the drain at that stage – even though we think of it now as the start of a modern Britain, for a lot of people it wasn’t.’
The world of gentry’s estates and afternoon tea, it seems, is something that Water’s writing simply cannot escape. Not that we’re complaining, as long as she continues to churn out her atmospheric, tightly plotted, Dickensian page-turners.
‘I am particularly drawn to writing back into a British literary tradition and hopefully, engaging in it – in a critical way,’ she says. Long may it last.

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