“Swallow up me”: hosts, guests and queer hospitality in Sarah Waters’ Affinity, Fingersmith, and Fingersmith fan fiction

ABSTRACT

Throughout Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian novels, the roles of hosting and visitation are rewritten by the queer desires of her lesbian characters. From Margaret Prior’s queer turn as the “Lady Visitor” of Millbank prison in Affinity, to the erotic convergence of hosts and guests in Fingersmith, the orthodox roles of Victorian hospitality – so essential to the construction of the boundaries that maintain public and private space – are repeatedly recoded in Waters’ writing. In Fingersmith fan fiction, this connection between spatial boundaries and queer affect is realised through the imagined reclamation of a home space that will house a more egalitarian and peaceful version of Maud and Sue’s relationship. This paper offers close readings of home/private/residential space in two of Waters’ novels, as well as in four fan-written stories inspired by Fingersmith. I argue that where the novel eroticizes the point of host/guest convergence between Maud and Sue, Fingersmith fan fiction imagines the queer shelter and domesticity that might grow from it, once those roles have been renegotiated and transcended.

KEYWORDS:

• Femslash
• fanfiction
• Lesbian
• Fingersmith
• hospitality
• queer domesticity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice M. Kelly

Alice M. Kelly is a literary and media scholar focusing on femslash fanfiction and its connection to queer cultural memory. She held a digital scholarship postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities 2019-2020, where she worked on the project ‘Winking Back: Femslash Fanfiction as Literature of Queer Survival in the Digital Age.’ Her first book, Decolonising the Conrad Canon, is based on the doctoral thesis she completed at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, on Joseph Conrad’s female characters and the colonial literary canon, and is under contract with Liverpool University Press.