Waters has, in short, created a fantasy world where queerness, while not celebrated by the general population, is visible rather than completely invisible.” After all, Kitty’s male impersonator show is attended by a wide audience, rather than just by lesbian attendees. However, after a tumultuous breakup, Nan and Kitty go their separate ways and our heroine continues her journey of self-discovery, alternating between presenting herself as a woman and as a man depending on the circumstances in which she finds herself. Before long, Nan joins Kitty’s act as a male impersonator herself.

The two girls become friends and then lovers, eventually moving together to London when Kitty is offered a new performing job in the big city. However, she goes through a sexual awakening when she goes to the local theater and claps eyes on performer/ male impersonator Kitty Butler for the first time. When she first appears, Nan is a lowly oyster-shucker with a male beau, complying with the societal expectations of the time. Published in 1998, Tipping the Velvet begins with eighteen-year-old Nancy 'Nan' Astley, a sheltered, small-town Victorian-era girl who works at her family restaurant by the sea. However, Waters’s novel, unlike Orlando, undermines its overall message when it makes a villain out of its bisexual characters or simply kills them off-something that has often been a staple in older gay and lesbian novels. The concept is intriguing, and fans of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel Orlando may find many parallels between the two works, as both books’ main characters make gender transitions in order to challenge gender roles. However, in Sarah Waters’s novel Tipping the Velvet, gender roles and other societal expectations of the Victorian time period are flipped on their heads when she writes queer characters who are free to live uncloseted, gender bend, and go to gay and lesbian bars without fear of being ostracized or -worst of all-imprisoned for “sexual deviance.” What comes to your mind when you think of Victorian England? Confining corsets and waist coats? Strict moral codes? Chimney sweeps? All true.

Tipping the velvet novel