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Photograph of Sarah Waters at a book signing, 2006
Annie_C_2, 2006 · CC BY 2.0 · Licence · Wikimedia Commons

Sapphic romance

Sarah Waters

born 1966

Novelist of lesbian love in Victorian and wartime England: Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.

Born
21 July 1966 · Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales
Nationality
Welsh
  • historical fiction
  • Victorian
  • lesbian fiction
  • Booker shortlist

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Sarah Waters, their publishers or their estate. Sarah Waters appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, and grew up in Middlesbrough. She studied English literature, taking a BA at the University of Kent, an MA at Lancaster and a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, and went from her doctoral thesis on gay and lesbian historical fiction directly to her first novel.

Her novels are best known for their Victorian settings and lesbian heroines. All but one of her books have lesbian themes, and she does not mind being labelled a lesbian writer: she has said she writes "with a clear lesbian agenda". Her fiction mixes the sensation novel, the historical novel and the ghost story.

Works

Major works

  1. 1998Tipping the Velvether debut, a music-hall romance; won a Betty Trask Award; a BBC mini-series in 2002
  2. 1999Affinityset among Victorian Spiritualists; won the Stonewall Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award
  3. 2002Fingersmithshortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize; filmed in Korea as The Handmaiden (2016)
  4. 2006The Night Watchset in London in the 1940s
  5. 2009The Little Strangera ghost story; her first novel with no overtly lesbian characters
  6. 2014The Paying Guestsset in 1922

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1998

    Published her first novel, Tipping the Velvet.

  2. 1999

    Won a Betty Trask Award for Tipping the Velvet, and published Affinity.

  3. 2002

    Fingersmith was published and shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes; the BBC filmed Tipping the Velvet the same year.

  4. 2005

    The BBC broadcast a three-part adaptation of Fingersmith.

  5. 2009

    Published The Little Stranger, a postwar ghost story.

  6. 2016

    Park Chan-wook's film The Handmaiden, adapted from Fingersmith and set in Korea, was released.

Why they are here

Sarah Waters and the shelf

Relevance

Waters writes the lesbian novel as high-end historical fiction: plotting, period detail and sensation in the Wilkie Collins tradition, with women's desire at the centre of it. Her work shows how far the genre can range beyond the contemporary romance.

Influence

Her novels were adapted for the BBC and, in Fingersmith's case, for Korean cinema, and she has done much to put lesbian historical fiction in the mainstream.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Sarah Waters, and they are not a recommendation on Sarah Waters’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Sarah Waters is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.