“Ladies in Peril”:

Sarah Waters on neo-Victorian narrative celebrations and why she stopped writing about the Victorian era

Abstract

Sarah Waters has become widely known and critically acclaimed as the author of three provocative neo-Victorian novels focusing on the romantic and sexual adventures of their lesbian protagonists: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002). In this interview, Waters talks to Abigail Dennis about how her academic training informs her fiction, the neo-Victorian phenomenon, and her decision, with her latest novel The Night Watch (2006), to suspend her creative relationship with the nineteenth century