Hugh's Reviews > Fingersmith

This was my first experience of reading Waters - I had been deterred by having seen some of the rather silly TV adaptation of Tipping the Velvet, but when this was chosen as a group read by the 21st Century Literature group I thought I should give it a chance.

Waters has clearly steeped herself in Victorian literature, and on one level this is a classic Victorian potboiler full of outlandish plot twists, coloured by the kind of period detail familiar from the likes of Dickens and Hardy.

The plot twists are so outrageous that I won't spoil them here. The two central characters (a classic pair of opposites) are two young women. Sue is an orphan brought up in a criminal household in London's underworld, and Maud is an heiress confined to her uncle's lonely mansion by the Thames near Marlow. The first and last parts are narrated by Sue, and the middle part by Maud, and they both drawn into a plot to gain Maud's inheritance, which is dependent on her marriage.

Waters explores many aspects of Victorian society and its hypocrisy, focussing on the experiences of women and their limited choices, with fascinating asides on mental hospitals, erotic fiction and various forms of criminal activity, some of which stretch the reader's credulity.

This was a very enjoyable read, so much so that I read most of the second half of the book in one day, if for me a little too melodramatic to be entirely satisfying.