1800s

I feel a bit like I’m living in the 1800s. Not only do I study 19th century literature, but I study the history and politics of the time. My mother also insists on forcing me to watch period dramas, and if they are by Hardy, all the better.

Thank you Sarah Waters for making it all bearable. I’m trying very hard not to join in the compulsory lesbian novelist worship cult, but she is a bit fabulous. Not only is her writing spot on, but it’s also a bit of lesbian escapism at it’s very best.

If you are forced to watch as many period dramas as me, you cannot fail to notice that the actresses inside the corsets are all practically the same. In many cases they are the same. My mother doesn’t realise that it makes it much, much easier to sit through several hours of good old 19th century chivalry and scandal if you can imagine the female protagonist passionately embracing another woman in a dramatisation of one of Sarah Water’s novels.

The memory of Sarah Waters also puts an entirely different angle on basically every woman in the novels I have to study; because now I know they are all secret lesbians who have their passion quashed by a patriarchal society. My English teacher disagrees.

She has clearly never read Waters.

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If you haven’t bought Sarah Water’s new book, ‘The Night Watch’. Do.