Sarah Waters: Making Socialism Sexy
Normally, I’m a pretty open-minded person, but when I saw Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters on a Barnes and Noble bookshelf, I couldn’t figure out what to think. Dildos and cross-dressing just didn’t match my conception of Victorian England at all. But I’d been led to the novel by the recommendation of a friend with excellent taste who had never been wrong about a book before. So, I took a deep breath and decided I could splurge eleven dollars on the little paperback.
I’m pleased to report that Tipping the Velvet not only tells a good story, it transforms commonly held perceptions about a time and place in history. Victorian Era London, commonly viewed as a stuffy, repressed age in which sex occurred only in marriage (and then only to make babies) instead comes alive on the pages of Waters’ novel as a dynamic, vibrant era, with a lot of revolutionary (and sexy) things going on behind closed doors. Continue reading »
Loading ...
