Reading Order
Fingersmith Reading Order
Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) is a standalone Victorian crime novel following Sue Trinder, a young London pickpocket, who is hired by the charming con man Richard Rivers to help him cheat a sheltered heiress — Maud Lilly — out of her inheritance, only to find that there are deeper betrayals at work than she knows. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. A masterpiece of sustained plot construction.
Where to start
Fingersmith
Complete Fingersmith Book List
- 1Buy
Fingersmith
Sarah Waters·2002·The complete novel. Entirely standalone; no sequels exist. - Buy
Tipping the Velvet
OptionalSarah Waters·1998·Nan King falls in love with a male impersonator in 1890s music halls and follows her to London — Waters's debut novel is the most accessible entry point to her work: an exuberant Victorian lesbian coming-of-age story before the darker complexity of Fingersmith. - Buy
Affinity
OptionalSarah Waters·1999·A wealthy Victorian woman begins visiting Millbank prison and becomes obsessed with a medium convicted of fraud — the Gothic Waters novel that most directly anticipates Fingersmith's atmosphere of entrapment and revelation; the ending is devastating. - Buy
The Little Stranger
OptionalSarah Waters·2009·A country doctor becomes increasingly involved with the last family living in a decaying manor house — Waters's Gothic horror novel and her departure from the Victorian lesbian fiction of her earlier work; highly recommended for Fingersmith readers who want her at her most atmospheric.
Fingersmith — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Fingersmith suitable for readers who are not interested in lesbian fiction?
Yes. While Fingersmith's central relationship is between two women, the novel is primarily a Victorian crime thriller of exceptional quality, and its romantic and erotic elements are integral to a plot that works equally as a story of suspense, betrayal, and revelation. Waters draws explicitly on the sensation novel tradition of Wilkie Collins — The Woman in White is the most obvious model — and on Victorian gothic fiction, and readers who love those genres have responded to Fingersmith regardless of their interest in lesbian fiction specifically. That said, the lesbian relationship is not incidental or peripheral; it is the engine of the plot's most powerful sections, and readers who are uncomfortable with it should know it is central.
What makes Fingersmith structurally unusual?
Fingersmith is constructed in three parts, each narrated in the first person by a different character (or the same character at a different time), with each part recontextualizing what has come before. The novel's central technique is the revelation — presented at the end of Part One — that massively changes the reader's understanding of everything that preceded it. Waters was explicit in interviews that she designed the novel around this revelation and that the first-person narration was chosen specifically because a first-person narrator can withhold without lying: Sue does not tell us things she does not know, and the reader, like Sue, discovers the full picture only gradually. The novel has the same structural relationship to the sensation novel that a magic trick has to a magic show: the pleasure is partly in the skill of the deception and partly in admiring how it was done once you know the answer.
How does Fingersmith relate to Victorian novels like The Woman in White?
Fingersmith is a conscious and loving homage to the Victorian sensation novel, particularly to Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. The structural similarities are deliberate: a young woman of uncertain identity, a conspiracy involving a forged will and a false identity, imprisonment in an asylum, and a plot that unfolds through documents and testimony. Waters updated Collins's preoccupations for a contemporary audience: where Collins was constrained in how explicitly he could treat the persecution of women under Victorian marriage law, Waters can be explicit about the sexual and economic dimensions of female dependence, and the lesbian relationship at the center of Fingersmith gives her access to desires that Collins could only hint at. The novel can be read as a feminist response to the sensation genre — it asks what would happen if the women in Collins's plots were not merely the victims and objects of male schemes but the authors of their own resistance.
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