Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters is one of the most popular and most widely read novelists of recent times. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, her novels, and their adaptations, have foregrounded the reclamation of lesbian history, and are arguably both cause and symptom of the extraordinary rise of the acceptance of lesbianism in mainstream fiction, TV, and film since the 1990s. Tipping the Velvet (1998), her first novel, drew heavily on Chris Hunt's Street Lavender (1986), telling the life story of Nancy King, brought up in a Whitstable oyster parlour in the late nineteenth century. Waters describes her second novel, Affinity (1999), as ‘the most genuinely historical book [of her first three novels,] and an attempt to capture the authentic lesbian voice’. The Night Watch, published in 2006, was a departure for Waters in a number of ways.