‘She began to show me the words she had written, one by one’: 1

1. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2001), p. 548. Subsequent references are to this edition and are in the text.

Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of Sarah Waters

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Notes

1. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2001), p. 548. Subsequent references are to this edition and are in the text.

2. Sarah Waters: Sex and the Victorian City, interview with Lisa Jardine on BBC2, 4 May 2005.

3. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 151.

4. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms and Contexts’ in De Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 10.

5. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 56.

6. Jardine, interview, Sarah Waters.

7. The exception is Anne Lister who displays in her diaries familiarity with a wide range of literature including works by Lord Byron and Thomas Moore. Helen Whitbread (ed.), I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, London: Virago, 1988, pp. 12, 17, 49.

8. Tricia Lootens, ‘Ann Bannon: A Lesbian Audience Discovers its Literature’, Off Our Backs, 13: 11, 1983, p. 12.

9. Diane Hamer, ‘“I am a Woman”: Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s’ in Mark Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 51.

10. Nicci Gerrard, Into the Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women's Writing (London: Pandora, 1989), p. 114.

11. Valerie Miner, ‘An Imaginative Collectivity of Writers and Readers’, in Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (eds.), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 14.

12. Mary Meigs, ‘Falling between the Cracks’, in Jay and Glasgow, p. 31.

13. For reference to queer/postmodern critiques of identity categories see Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), pp. 58–71.

14. Elizabeth Meese, ‘Theorising Lesbian: Writing—A Love Letter’, in Jay and Glasgow, p. 83.

15. Judith Butler, ‘Critically Queer’ in Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive Limits of “Sex”’ (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 229.

16. Jardine, interview, Sarah Waters.

17. Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (London: Virago, 1998), p. 218. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are in the text.

18. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1, 1976, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 43–9; 61–73.

19. See Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993), pp. 25–58.

20. For discussion of the novel's Gothic features see Paulina Palmer, ‘Lesbian Gothic: Genre, Transformation, Transgression’, Gothic Studies, 6: 1, 2004, pp. 118–30.

21. Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 1999), p. 46. Subsequent references are to this edition and are in the text.

22. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 40.

23. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narrative: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 119–27.

24. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 187.

25. Waters's representation of the triangular relationship between Sue, Rivers and Maud agrees with Terry Castle's definition of ‘the underlying principle of lesbian narrative’. She describes how the canonical male-female-male erotic trianglulation is replaced by the female-male-female erotic triangulation, with the male term eventually disappearing from view and enabling the female-female dyad to achieve centrality. (Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 70–91.)

26. Sue's illiteracy lands her in trouble again on a subsequent occasion when, having gained possession of a letter containing her mother's will with information about her upper-class status and inheritance, she has to pay a passer-by seven pence to decipher it (Fingersmith, p. 530–2).

27. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981), pp. 38–46.

28. Donoghue, Passions between Women, p. 218.

29. Jardine, interview, Sarah Waters.

30. Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 99–106.

31. See Judith Roof, ‘The Match in the Crocus: Representations of Lesbian Sexuality’, in Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldstein (eds.), Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 100–15; and Earl Jackson, Jr., ‘Explicit Instruction: Teaching Gay Male Sexuality in Literature Classes’, in George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmerman (eds.), Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature (New York: MLA, 1995), pp. 147–51.

32. Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989 (London: Onlywomen Press, 1992), p. 97.

33. Emma Healey, Lesbian Sex Wars (London: Virago, 1996), p. 142.

34. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 146.

35. Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 4.

36. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian/Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 20.

37. Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 5.

38. Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006), p. 4. Subsequent references are to this edition and are in the text.

39. Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, p. 20.

40. For discussion of lesbian detective fiction, see Sally Munt, Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 120–46.