It's 1887 and Nancy Astley sits in the audience at her local music hall: she doesn't know it yet, but the next act on the bill will change her life. Tonight is the night she'll fall in love... with the thrill of the stage and with Kitty Butler, a girl who wears trousers. Giddy with desire and hungry for experience, Nancy follows Kitty to London where unimaginable adventures await. Sarah Waters' debut novel, Tipping the Velvet was highly acclaimed and was chosen by The New York Times and The Library Journal as one of the best books of 1998. Reviewers have offered the most praise for Tipping the Velvet's use of humour, adventure, and sexual explicitness. The novel was adapted into a somewhat controversial three-part series of the same name produced and broadcast by the BBC in 2002.
'Everyone's appetites will be satisfied' ELLE MAGAZINE
'Waters is an author to cherish' GUARDIAN
Celebrating five decades of the feminist publisher, each of the Five Gold Reads represents an iconic moment in Virago's history, from the 1970s to today.
Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen . . .
Sarah Waters's debut, a delicious reimagining of late-Victorian life, chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable. Her fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler.
When Kitty's career takes a glittering turn, Nan accompanies her to London as her dresser and secret lover, and, soon after after, dons trousers herself to join the act. But this is only beginning of Nan's adventures, in a novel that follows her through heartbreak, recovery and steamy sexual education, and sees her finally finding friendship and true love in the most unexpected places.
'It's a rare pleasure to discover a writer as assured as Waters' SUNDAY TIMES
'A first-class storyteller' EVENING STANDARD
'Sarah Waters, quite simply, is one of our greatest writers' SUNDAY EXPRESS
'Waters' persistent picking apart of class is fascinating' OBSERVER
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