Tipping the Velvet (Virago V) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Tipping the Velvet (Virago V) Book

The heroine of Sarah Waters's audacious first novel knows her destiny, and seems content with it. Her place is in her father's seaside restaurant, shucking shellfish and stirring soup, singing all the while. "Although I didn't believe the story told to me by Mother--that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch--for 18 years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked beyond my father's kitchen for occupation, or for love." At night Nancy Astley often ventures to the nearby music hall, not that she has illusions of being more than an audience member. But the moment she spies a new male impersonator--still something of a curiosity in England circa 1888--her years of innocence come to an end and a life of transformations begins.Tipping the Velvet, all 472 pages of it, is as saucy, as tantalising, and as touching as the narrator's first encounter with the seductive but shame-ridden Miss Kitty Butler. And at first even Nancy's family is thrilled with her gender-bending pal, all but her sister, best friend, and bedmate, Alice, "her eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion". Not to worry. Soon Nancy and Kitty are off to London, their relationship close though (alas for our heroine) sisterly. We know that bliss will come, and it does, in an exceptionally charged moment. A lesser author would have been content to stop her story there, but Waters has much more in mind for her buttonholing heroine, and for us. In brief, her Everywoman with a sexual difference goes from success onstage to heartbreak to a stint as a male prostitute (necessity truly is the mother of invention) to keeping house for a brother and sister in the Labour movement. And did I mention her long stint as a plaything in the pleasure palace of a rich Sapphist extraordinaire? Diana Lethaby is as cruel as she is carnal, and even the well- concealed Cavendish Ladies' Club isn't outré enough for her. Kitting Nancy out in full, elegant drag, she dares the front desk to turn them away. "We are here," she mocks, "for the sake of the irregular." Only after some seven years of hard twists and sensual turns does Nancy conclude that a life of sensation is not enough. Still, Tipping the Velvet is so entertaining that readers will wish her sentimental--and hedonistic--education had taken twice as long. --Kerry Fried, Amazon.comRead More

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  • Amazon

    B format publication of this wonderfully lush, sensuous and bawdy novel set in the music halls of the late 19th century.

  • Play

    A saucy sensuous and multi-layered historical romance TIPPING THE VELVET follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent-boy turned East End tom. ; ; "Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster? If you have you will remember it. Some quirk of the Kentish coastline makes Whitstable natives - as they are properly called - the largest and the juiciest the savouriest yet the subtlest oysters in the whole of England. Whitstable oysters are quite rightly famous. The French who are known for their sensitive palates regularly cross the Channel for them; they are shipped in barrels of ice to the dining tables of Hamburg and Berlin. Why the King himself I heard makes special trips to Whitstable with Mrs Keppel to eat oyster suppers in a private hotel; and as for the old Queen - she dined on a native a day (or so they say) till the day she died. ; ; Did you ever go to Whitstable and see the oyster-parlours there? My father kept one; I was born in it - do you recall a narrow weather-boarded house painted a flaking blue half-way between the High Street and the harbour? Do you remember the bulging sign that hung above the door that said that Astley''s Oysters the Best in Kent were to be had within? Did you perhaps push at that door and step into the dim low-ceilinged fragrant room beyond it? Can you recall the tables with their chequered cloths - the bill of fare chalked on a board - the spirit-lamps the sweating slabs of butter. ; 'An unstoppable read a sexy and picaresque romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaring Nineties. Could this be a new genre? The bawdy lesbian picaresque novel?' - Independent On Sunday. ; 'This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson' - Daily Telegraph ; 'A delightful novel which sets a new standard for lesbian historical fiction & should entice new readers to the genre' - Emma Donoghue

  • Foyles

    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. A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King – oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'. Nan is captivated by the music hall phenomenon that is Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they start an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins. But as their relationship becomes passionately all-consuming, it threatens to be the ruin of all of Nan’s ambitions. A bawdy, vaudevillian delight of a novel, Tipping the Velvet launched the career of one of Britain's most exciting and successful writers, described as `one of the best storytellers alive today' by the Independent. Tipping the Velvet was adapted by Andrew Davies and filmed by Sally Head Productions for the BBC.

  • TheBookPeople

    Nan is captivated by the music hall phenomenon that is Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they start an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.

  • BookDepository

    Tipping The Velvet : Paperback : Little, Brown Book Group : 9781860495243 : : 26 Jun 2012 : A reissue with a new introduction to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters's wonderfully lush, sensuous and bawdy debut novel set in the music halls of the late 19th century.

  • Blackwell

    * Sarah Water's wonderfully lush, sensuous and bawdy debut novel set in the music halls of the late 19th century - reissued with a stunning new jacket Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre...

  • 1860495249
  • 9781860495243
  • Sarah Waters
  • 4 March 1999
  • Virago Press Ltd
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 472
  • New edition
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