"Lavishly crammed with the songs, smells, and costumes of late Victorian England" (The Daily Telegraph), this delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler. When Kitty is called up to London for an engagement on "Grease Paint Avenue, " Nan follows as her dresser and secret lover, and, soon after, dons trousers herself and joins the act.
In time, Kitty breaks her heart, and Nan assumes the guise of butch roue to commence her own thrilling and varied sexual education—a sort of Moll Flanders in drag—finally finding friendship and true love in the most unexpected places.
Drawing comparison to the work of Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters's novel is a feast for the senses—an erotic, lushly detailed historical novel that bursts with life and dazzlingly casts the turn of the century in a different light.
Intrigued by this attractive young woman who dresses, dances, and sings "as a feller," Nancy returns to the music hall several more times, finally catching Miss Butler's attention. A friendship quickly develops and before long, Nancy has become Kitty's dresser, helping her to change costumes between acts. Though Nancy is keenly aware of her desire to make her relationship with Kitty more than mere friendship, she bides her time, unsure of Kitty's own preference.
When a talent agent discovers Kitty and offers her a debut in the London theater district, Nancy's role as Kitty's dresser becomes official and, at Kitty's invitation, Nancy tags along. The two girls are mesmerized by the bright lights and city life, and when Nancy eventually joins the act as a second male impersonator with the stage name Nan King, both their professional and their sexual lives soar to new heights.
But Kitty isn't comfortable with her life as a Tom, and in an effort to hide her true sexuality, she decides to closet herself by agreeing to marry her male agent and abruptly ending her relationship with Nan. Brokenhearted and devastated, Nan blunders off in a depressive funk, taking nothing but a little money and her stage costumes with her. With no means of generating any income, Nan dons her male persona and hits the streets to make a living as a "renter," providing oral sex to men who take her for a boy prostitute.
For a while Nan accepts the daily degradations, but eventually it starts to wear on her. Just as she feels she has reached the lowest point in her life, salvation arrives in the form of one Diana Lethaby, a rich widow with a voracious and somewhat twisted sexual appetite. When Diana invites Nan to become her live-in girl-toy, Nan jumps at the chance. For the next year or so, Nan willingly gives up any semblance of independence in exchange for a life of decadent sex and opulent luxury, the likes of which she has never known.
It doesn't last, however, and in fact disappears in the blink of an eye when Diana tosses Nan out into the street over a sexual transgression. Destitute and desperate, Nan manages to seek out the home of social worker Florence Banner, a woman Nan met briefly just before being taken in by Diana. With Florence, Nan struggles to find her true self, to establish some semblance of a normal life, and to put her past behind her.
Unexpectedly, it is with the plain-faced, hard-working Florence that Nan has the chance to find real love, but her feelings and commitment will be sorely tested by the sudden reappearance of several faces from her own past and a lingering ghost from Florence's past that threatens to keep them apart.
Waters depicts her characters and settings with colorful flair and vivid imagery. From the simple, hardworking values of an English fishing village to the bawdy, flamboyant lifestyles of the performers in London's theaters, Tipping the Velvet paints a sensuously lavish picture of the smells, sights, denizens, and desires of late Victorian England and its growing lesbian culture.
-- Beth Amos