Tipping The Velvet - Inspiration and Publication

Inspiration and Publication

When Sarah Waters was 19 years old, she joined a student house in Whitstable, Kent, sharing a bed and then falling in love with another young woman. They lived there for two winters in what became a six-year relationship. She recalled, "It was cold, isolated, romantic and so intense—quite special." In 1995, Waters was at Queen Mary and Westfield College writing her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction from 1870 onward when she became interested in the Victorian era. While learning about the activism in socialism, women's suffrage, and utopianism of the period, she was inspired to write a work of fiction of the kind that she would like to read. Specifically, Waters intended to write a story that focused on an urban setting, diverging from previous lesbian-themed books such as Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah, in which two women escape an oppressive home life to live together freely in the woods. She said to herself at the time, "there's so much more to lesbian history than that".

Waters was drawn to the Victorian era because of the (mis)understandings of what social norms existed during the period. As she stated, "I find it a fascinating period because it feels very close to us, and yet in lots of ways it is utterly strange: many of the things we think we know about it are stereotypes, or simply wrong." Considering herself part of gay and lesbian literary heritage, Waters was influenced by Oscar Wilde, and Chris Hunt, who wrote Street Lavender, an historical novel with gay male themes also set in the Victorian era. She has stated that Tipping the Velvet is a female version of Street Lavender, with a plot similar to James Kincaid's My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London.

Waters pitched Tipping the Velvet to ten British publishers, but after they all rejected it, she began considering American publishing houses. Although she was picked up quickly by a literary agency, the agent spent almost a year trying to sell the book to a mainstream publisher. By the time Tipping the Velvet was accepted by Virago Press—one of the ten that had previously passed on the project—Waters had already begun work on her second novel.