Unwanted wives incarcerated in
asylums, unwanted babies farmed out to criminals, a drawing master seducing his
young lady student and a scholarly uncle sequestering his heiress ward from the
rest of the world. If you’re well versed in the building blocks of Victorian
sensation novels, there’s much about Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith that may seem familiar.
Yet this 2002 thriller manages to
defy expectations in new and exciting ways – not just by introducing
sensational plotlines and dialogue that would have been inadmissible to
Collins, Braddon and Reade (a central female/female romance, a bibliographical
study of pornography, plenty of ‘fucks’, ‘cunts’, and, my personal favourite,
‘fucksters’), but by forcing us to reassess who we can trust and the false
security our previous literary knowledge might have given us.
The novel starts in the
unforgiving world of Borough, where men and women eat by stealing purses and
skinning dogs. A debonair trickster known as ‘Gentleman’ has a plan - petty
thief Susan Trinder, daughter of a murderess, must leave London for Briar, a
country house near Maidenhead, to become maid to Maud Lilly and help him steal
her away along with her fortune.
Sarah Waters (1966-) |
This is the point at which we expect
Sue to enter the Victorian world we know from novels – a world of hierarchy,
etiquette and morality – but soon it becomes clear that she is in much more
danger here, and it is dirty, amoral Borough that is the novel’s pattern for love
and domesticity.
What comes next is a few hundred
pages of twists and turns, double crossing and, at times, brutality. Could it
have done with a more extensive edit? Yes, but Waters keep you guessing to the
very end and reading fast to the finish line. The title Fingersmith hints at thievery, midwifery and female masturbation,
yet it also conjures up the idea of a wordsmith, playing with readers’ emotions
and stirring up their imaginations – appropriate given the novel’s final
moments, and the original conception of sensation fiction.
What would you like to see the
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