Abstract
On 17 December 2008, Sarah Waters participated in a photo-shoot for one of the UK’s oldest, feminist, charitable organisations, The Fawcett Society, of which she is a long-standing supporter. For the photo Waters wore one of the Fawcett’s famous t-shirts emblazoned with the iconic declaration ‘This is what a feminist looks like’. Standing with her hands in her pockets, Waters looks relaxed. Despite her casual demeanour, though, her gaze is in earnest; it suggests that this is someone who takes feminism seriously yet someone whose feminist dedication is something of a second nature, something habitual, it is ‘just an instinctive thing’, as she has put it elsewhere. Posted as part of the feminist gallery on Fawcett’s website and associated social media outlets, the photo appears alongside Waters’s response to the question, ‘Why are you a feminist?’. She comments that ‘feminism is part of a wider struggle against all inequalities’ only to then retort, ‘Surely the real question should be, not “Why are you a feminist” but “Why aren’t you one?”’ This carefully phrased response is important, for it not only registers how being a feminist is a fundamental belief and part of Waters’s everyday outlook, but also signals implicitly her resistance to the idea of feminism as something outdated and stigmatised. Together, her photo and response indicate how being a feminist remains a necessity in a world that repeatedly tries to tell us that equality between the sexes is achieved and that feminism is no longer relevant. Here, Waters does not confirm what the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ mean to her specifically, she only goes as far as evoking a particular political outlook and resists elaborating on its specificity. This collection, devoted to the exploration of contemporary feminism in Waters’s writings, will not only testify to the fact that feminism as a political movement and a form of literary enquiry is still very much alive but will also seek to elucidate what Sarah Waters’s feminisms are in textual practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Abigail Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”: Sarah Waters on neo-Victorian narrative celebrations and why she stopped writing about the Victorian era’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), 41–52 (p. 42).
- 2.
‘Sarah Waters’, The Fawcett Society, 17 December 2008 https://www.flickr.com/photos/fawcettsociety/3114961665/ (accessed 18 August 2014). Web.
- 3.
Waters, ‘Sarah Waters’, n.p.
- 4.
Lucie Armitt and Sarah Gamble, ‘The Haunted Geometries of Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), 141–59 (p. 141).
- 5.
Danuta Kean, ‘Sarah Waters Interview: “I pay attention to women’s secret history and lives”’, The Independent, 6 September 2014 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sarah-waters-interview-i-pay-attention-to-womens-secret-history-and-lives-9715463.html (accessed 30 August 2014). Web.
- 6.
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2002), p. 191.
- 7.
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Into History through the Back Door: The “Past Historic” in Nights at the Circus and Affinity’, Women: A Cultural Review 15:2 (2004), 153–66 (p. 154).
- 8.
Jerome de Groot, ‘“Something New and a Bit Startling”: Sarah Waters and the Historical Novel’, Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 56–68 (p. 61).
- 9.
Kaye Mitchell, ‘Introduction: The Popular and Critical Reception of Sarah Waters’, Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 1–15 (p. 6).
- 10.
Kohlke, ‘Into history’, p. 153.
- 11.
Jennifer Terry, ‘Theorising Deviant Historiography’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3:2 (1991), 55–74 (p. 55).
- 12.
Laura Doan and Sarah Waters, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’, Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Reconfiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. by David Alderson and Linda Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 12–28 (p.12).
- 13.
Even though Tipping the Velvet ends “happily” it is only the beginning of Nan’s awakening to the (still) unresolved issues of socialist feminism.
- 14.
Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.
- 15.
Jeanette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 3–4.
- 16.
Cora Kaplan, ‘Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies’, Journal of Victorian Culture 13:1 (Spring 2008), 42–55, (p. 52).
- 17.
Rosario Arias, ‘Epilogue: Female Confinement in Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shaming: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age, ed. by Frank Lauterback and Jan Alber (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009) pp. 256–77 (p. 267).
- 18.
Ann Heilmann, ‘Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and its Intertexts’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 6:1 (2012), 38–55 (p. 39 and p. 41).
- 19.
‘Rethinking Generational History: Queer Histories of Sexuality in Neo-Victorian Feminist Fiction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39:2 (2006), 135–47, (p. 143).
- 20.
See Sarah Ann Waters, “Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present” (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995) p. 11.
- 21.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I Should Say It Is Criminal!”: Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999)’, Journal of Gender Studies 13:3 (2004), 203–14 (p. 204).
- 22.
See Louisa Yates, ‘“But it’s only a novel, Doran”: Neo-Victorian Fiction and the Process of Re-Vision’, Neo-Victorian Studies 2:2 (Winter 2009/2010), 186–211.
- 23.
Robert McCrum, ‘What Lies Beneath’, The Guardian, 10 May 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/books-sarah-waters (accessed 30 October 2014). Web.
- 24.
Victoria Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 1.
- 25.
Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation, p. 1.
- 26.
See Sarah Ann Waters, “Wolfskins and Togas: Lesbian and Gay Historical Fictions, 1870 to the Present” (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1995).
- 27.
‘“The Most Famous Fairy in History”: Antinous and Homosexual Fantasy’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6:2 (1995), 194–230.
- 28.
See Lucie Armitt, ‘Teasing (Out) a New Generation: The Writing of Sarah Waters’, p. 31–54, p. 30. in this volume.
- 29.
Diana Wallace, The Women’s Historical Novel, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2005), p. 228.
- 30.
See Rachel Carroll, ‘“Becoming My Own Ghost”: Spinsterhood, Heterosexuality and Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Genders Online, 45 (2007) http://www.genders.org/g45/g45_carroll.html Web.
- 31.
See Rachel Carroll, ‘Rethinking Generational History: Queer Histories of Sexuality in Neo-Victorian Feminist Fiction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39:2 (2006), 135–47.
- 32.
See Nadine Muller, ‘Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-wave Feminism & Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Neo-Victorian Studies 2:2 (2009/2010), 109–36.
- 33.
See Nadine Muller, ‘Ladies, Lunatics and Fallen Women in the New Millennium: The Feminist Politics of Neo-Victorian Fiction, 2000–2010’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Hull, October 2011; and Claire O’Callaghan, ‘“The Grossest Rakes of Fiction”: Re-Assessing Gender, Sex and Pornography in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, forthcoming 2015.
- 34.
See Claire O’Callaghan, ‘“Lesbo Victorian Romp”: Women, Sex and Pleasure in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet, Sexualities and Contemporary Fiction, ed. by Joel Gwynne and Angelia Poon (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013), pp. 61–80.
- 35.
See Adele Jones, ‘Disrupting the Continuum: Collapsing Space and Time in Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch’, Journal of Gender Studies 23.1 (2014): 33–44.
- 36.
See Claire O’Callaghan, ‘Sarah Waters’s Victorian Domestic Spaces; Or, The Lesbians in the Attic’, Peer English: The Journal of New Critical Thinking, 9 (2014), 122–38 (p. 135).
- 37.
See Paulina Palmer, ‘“She began to show me the words she had written, one by one”: Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of Sarah Waters’, Women: A Cultural Review, 19:1 (2008), 69–96.
- 38.
See Sonja Tiernan, ‘Tipping the Balance with Historical Fiction: Tipping the Velvet as a Lesbian Feminist Device’, Irish Feminist Review, 1 (2005), 161–78; and Sarah Parker, ‘“The Darkness is the Closet in Which Your Lover Roosts Her Heart”: Lesbians, Desire and the Gothic Genre’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9:2 (2008), 4–19.
- 39.
See Rachel Wood, “Walking and Watching” in Queer London: Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17:3–4 (2013), 305–16.
- 40.
Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.
- 41.
Cheryl Wilson, ‘From the Drawing Room to the Stage: Performing Sexuality in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, Women’s Studies, 35:3 (2006), 285–305; and Mandy, ‘Historical Fiction and the Revaluing of Historical Continuity in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, Contemporary Literature, 51:2 (2010), 371–97.
- 42.
See Sarah Gamble, ‘“You cannot impersonate what you are”: Questions of Authenticity in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 20:1 (2009), 126–40.
- 43.
See Jeremiah, ‘The “I” Inside Her’ (previously cited); Cheryl Wilson, ‘From the Drawing Room to the Stage: Performing Sexuality in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, Women’s Studies, 35:3 (2006), 285–305; and Mandy Koolen, ‘Historical Fiction and the Revaluing of Historical Continuity in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet’, Contemporary Literature, 51:2 (2010), 371–97.
- 44.
See Emma Parker, ‘The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger’, Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 99–113.
- 45.
See Helen Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 46.
See Kaye Mitchell, “What does it feel like to be an anachronism?’: Time in The Night Watch’, Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 84–98.
- 47.
de Groot, ‘Something New’, p. 62.
- 48.
Davies, Gender and Ventriloquism, p. 117.
- 49.
Elizabeth Weed, ‘Introduction’, When Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. by Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. vii–xiii (p. vii)
- 50.
Weed, ‘Introduction’, p. vii.
- 51.
Weed, ‘Introduction’, p. vii.
- 52.
Weed, ‘Introduction’, p. vii.
- 53.
Janice McLaughlin, Mark E. Casey and Diane Richardson, ‘Introduction: At the Intersections of Feminist and Queer Debates’, Intersections Between Feminist and Queer Theory, ed. by Diane Richardson, Janice McLaughlin, and Mark E. Casey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1–19 (p. 3).
- 54.
McLaughlin, Casey and Richardson, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
- 55.
McLaughlin, Casey and Richardson, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
- 56.
Sarah Waters, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, SarahWaters.com, 2009 http://www.sarahwaters.com/about/faq/. Web.
- 57.
Mel Steel, ‘Books: Fiction in Brief’, The Independent, 22 March 1998 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books-iction-inbrief1151853.html (accessed 30 August 2014). Web.
- 58.
Lucie Armitt, ‘Interview with Sarah Waters’, Feminist Review 85:1 (2006), pp. 116–27 (p. 121).
- 59.
McCrum, ‘What Lies Beneath’, n. p. to be consistent.
- 60.
Abigail Dennis, ‘“Ladies in Peril”: Sarah Waters on neo-Victorian Narrative Celebrations and Why She Stopped Writing About the Victorian Era’, Neo-Victorian Studies (2008), pp. 410–52 (p. 42).
- 61.
Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, College English, 34:1 (1972), 18–30 (p. 18).
- 62.
Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, p. 18.
- 63.
Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken’, p. 18.
- 64.
Sarah Waters, ‘Introduction’, Nights at the Circus (1984) by Angela Carter (London: Vintage, 2006), pp. v–xi (pp. vi–vii).
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Jones, A., O’Callaghan, C. (2016). Sarah Waters’s Feminisms. In: Jones, A., O'Callaghan, C. (eds) Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50608-5_1
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