A tempestuous tale of love and life as a nave girl discovers both romance and pain in the hidden, decadent world of bohemian London in the 1890s.Nan Astley embarks on a voyage of emotional and sexual discovery with Kitty Butler, a music hall male impersonator.My brain was young and juicy in those days and I could do those kind of things.
The author explains how it remains faithful to her original Visions of Victorian murder and madness and mayhem Sarah Waters. ![]() Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-HibbertGetty Images carmitstead Sat 8 Apr 2017 06.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 13.51 EST You pearl, I said. So white she was. ![]() The dialogue is uttered in a scene of lesbian lovemaking that has been cited by both male and female, gay and heterosexual commentators as one of the sexiest encounters in literature. Waters first two novels, Tipping the Velvet and Affinity, had signalled a powerful new voice in lesbian fiction, but Fingersmith took it to a new level, its kaleidoscopic prose and structure creating a dizzying variety of desires and perspectives. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, it was one of David Bowies 100 must-read novels and has had a lusty afterlife in theatre and TV. Published in 2002, Fingersmith is a story of deception involving a pickpocket, a conman, a pornographer and an heiress. Now it has been reimagined in film by Korean director Park Chan-wook, who has defied differences in culture, gender and media to create a complementary classic of erotic cinema. The Handmaiden transports the story from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, when the peninsula was occupied by Japan. In the novel, the pickpocket Sue is lured away from a bustling thieves kitchen in London to the countryside with the promise of a share in a soon-to-be-stolen fortune; in the film, seamstress Sook-hee is hustled off into a rainstorm on an undeclared mission at the house of a rich Japanese recluse, leaving a wailing chorus of women and babies huddled beneath the eaves of their roadside shack. Fans of the novel might well wonder how Waters richly verbal story of lesbian sexuality a gasp of release from the sensuously evoked corsetry of Victorian female propriety could survive this transformation, and not least because the director is a man, with a reputation for making macho films of extravagant violence. Waters herself concedes that it seemed a slightly mind-boggling idea. She was involved in selling the film rights along with the company that had made a well-received three-part TV adaptation, and steeled herself to find out what she would be letting herself in for by watching Parks 2003 revenge tragedy Oldboy. Fingersmith, she points out, is excessive too, with its roots in those Victorian novels about murder and madness and mayhem. In person, Waters seems about as far from madness and mayhem as it is possible to be. Tipping The Velvet S01E01 Torrent Professional Novelist InAt 50, with six novels to her name, she lives the quiet life of a professional novelist in south London with her partner of many years, Lucy Vaughan. Tipping The Velvet S01E01 Torrent Full Of BodicesWhere Fingersmith is full of bodices and petticoats, the softest leather and the most lustrous silks, its author is most likely to be found in jeans. Photograph: AllstarAmazon Studios When I pull an old paperback of Fingersmith out of my bag she looks surprised and says, Its very big, isnt it It takes a few seconds for the significance of this to sink in Ive never reread it, she admits, adding that the only one of her six novels that she has reread is Tipping the Velvet and all I wanted to do was tidy it up. One of the nice things about adaptations is it gives you a chance to revisit the story and characters, she says. Four of her novels have been adapted for television and in the three Victorian romps including Fingersmith she made cameo appearances. The fourth adaptation, The Night Watch, a chronologically reversed story set in the second world war, reflected the shift in her writing to more nuanced and sombre worlds. Her fifth and sixth novels have both been optioned for film, with her most recent, The Paying Guests, being adapted by Emma Donoghue, author (and adapter) of Room. But it is The Handmaiden that marks her first excursion on to the big screen, and she regards the ingenuity of the plotting with an almost parental delight, as the work of a younger, more playful self that the film has not so much mimicked as amplified, with its own ingenious twists and turns.
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