Recommendations
Books Like Fingersmith
Victorian Crime and Gothic Novels Like Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters's Fingersmith is the perfect Victorian crime novel — two women, an elaborate con, and a plot that turns on itself. These 8 novels share its intricate construction, its Victorian atmosphere, and its interest in women who refuse the roles history assigned them.
- 1Buy
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
The Victorian sensation novel that Fingersmith most directly rewrites — stolen identity, asylum, forged documents, multiple narrators — Collins's 1859 masterpiece is the obvious antecedent to Waters's plot; where Collins is constrained by Victorian conventions about what women can want, Waters can make the lesbian dimensions of the story fully explicit
- 2Buy
Affinity
by Sarah Waters
A wealthy Victorian woman begins visiting Millbank prison and becomes obsessed with a medium convicted of fraud — Waters's 1999 novel is the direct companion to Fingersmith: the same Victorian setting, the same atmosphere of entrapment, the same devastating revelation at the novel's end about who has deceived whom; many Waters readers consider it her finest novel
- 3Buy
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
An unnamed narrator is haunted by the perfect ghost of her husband's first wife — du Maurier's 1938 Gothic shares Fingersmith's technique of building dread through the slow revelation of a deception, its dominant female characters who are not what they appear, and its setting in a wealthy household whose real power structure is not what the narrator initially understands
- 4Buy
Lady Audley's Secret
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Lady Audley, the beautiful, charming wife of a baronet, is hiding a secret that her nephew-in-law will risk everything to expose — Braddon's 1862 sensation novel shares Fingersmith's Victorian setting and its interest in a woman who uses feminine attractiveness as a weapon within a social order that offers no other tools
- 5Buy
The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
A widow in 1920s London takes in lodgers and falls in love with the wife of one of them — Waters's 2014 novel is her most recent major work and the most acclaimed; where Fingersmith is intricate and plot-driven, The Paying Guests is more psychological, but both are driven by a lesbian love that leads to crime and disaster
- 6Buy
Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
Grace Marks, a Canadian servant convicted of murder in 1843, tells her story to a doctor hired to determine whether she was sane — Atwood's 1996 novel shares Fingersmith's Victorian setting, its first-person female narrator whose reliability is constantly in question, and its interest in the ways that women of the period were defined by forces they could not control
- 7Buy
The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Sugar, a prostitute in 1870s London, works her way into the household of a wealthy perfume manufacturer — Faber's 2002 novel shares Fingersmith's Victorian immersion and its interest in the economic and social conditions that shaped women's lives; a different kind of Victorian feminist fiction, darker and more explicit, but equally serious about the period
- 8Buy
Tipping the Velvet
by Sarah Waters
Nan King falls in love with a male impersonator in 1890s music halls and follows her to London — Waters's debut is the most cheerful of her Victorian novels and the easiest entry point; where Fingersmith is dark and intricate, Tipping the Velvet is exuberant and picaresque; both are excellent, and most readers who love one will love the other
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