The haunted geometries of Sarah Waters's<i>Affinity</i>

Abstract

Sarah Waters, born in Pembrokeshire in Wales in 1966, lives and works in London, a city that has become not only her domestic home, but the key backdrop for her fiction. To date she has written three prize-winning novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002); her fourth, The Night Watch, is due out in February 2006. Though a shift of time and place is anticipated in The Night Watch, in her first three books London is simultaneously home and hovel, its architecture oscillating between the grim, labyrinthine corridors of poor Victorian housing and the imposing wealth of suburban and rural privilege. All three share a fascination with the past as spectre haunting the present and explore the effect of this haunting on the lives and loves of dissident women. As her sub-plots weave and interweave through each other, what becomes clear is the manner in which these apparently distinct strands of life feed upon each other. Powerfully woman-centred in her focus, Waters nevertheless refuses to idealize her female characters who, always more fascinating for having a dark side, often combine criminality and the occult. It is this curious intermingling of passion, crime, sensationalism and social justice that characterizes her creativity.