There is a character named Dainty who is seen by the main characters as a simpleton who allows herself to be ill-treated. Even the small side characters are vivid and fully-formed. The two main characters, Susan and Maud, are multi-faceted and deep. Waters wraps up the many, many questions neatly without info-dumping. There are delicious cliff-hangers at the end of the first two parts, both calling up so many questions that are answered in the following part. Now, fifteen years after first reading Fingersmith, I was driven to stay up late and read until the words were running down the page. It has all my favorite Victorian tropes: an asylum, a depressing, forbidding manor, and London’s sooty, filthy, lurid underbelly. It’s a wonderful, thrilling suspense novel. As a baby lesbian this made Fingersmith one of the least traumatic books I read, and I desperately needed to see my sexuality as something that I didn’t need to be ashamed of.īut Fingersmith is so much more than a “lesbian book”. This book has plenty of secrecy and shame, but the lesbian stigma is refreshingly absent. I was fifteen, and I was used to books about lesbians that dealt with secrecy, shame, and the horrible stigma of being a lesbian. I first read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters in the early days of my coming out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |