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First off, I would like to thank Sarah Waters for expanding my vocabulary. I can now dirty talk just like a 1890 White Chapel harlot and I love it! I learned new expressions for cunnilingus and clitoris with this book, and God knows you can’t have too many words to refer to those things. Moving on to the actual story!

I loved just about everything in “Tipping the Velvet��. This is the bildungsroman Dickens would have written if he 1) hadn’t been paid by the page and had 2) not been a middle-class hetero-normative straight man.

Nancy is reasonably happy helping her family run their oyster restaurant in Kent, but she feels like there is more to life than her humdrum existence, and she doesn’t really like being kissed and touched by her beau�� One day, she goes to the theater and sees Kitty on stage. Kitty is a “masher��: she sings show tunes wearing men’s outfits. Suddenly, Nan’s eyes are open and while she can hardly admit to herself how she feels, she falls in love with Kitty. She leaves her family to follow Kitty to London, where she becomes her dresser and assistant�� and yes, the two eventually become lovers. But just like any honeymoon, this state of bliss doesn’t last and Nan is soon launched into the sort of life Mr. Dickens has never written about!

“Tipping the Velvet�� has great characters: very human, with strong feelings and personalities. Nan’s voice is in turn naïve, cynical, heartbreaking and passionate. She is very caring but she can also be selfish and rough. The plot follows about 5 years of life and takes the reader from the humble oyster shack to the squalid city theaters, the fancy villas and the working class slums with vivid, often darkly humorous descriptions. Even if you don’t like Nan, you will want to follow her in her adventures through a London we don’t hear about very often: the mysterious gay underground of the Victorian era. There you will meet hedonistic and perverted ladies, passionate political activists, hard-working transvestites and dreamy stars of the theatre who will help shape Nan’s character, help her find herself and grow. Waters is very sensitive to the wide range of emotions a young person goes through when they fall in love for the first time, lose their innocence and hope, have to learn to fend for themselves, and Nan is a character you can believe in and root for.

Waters�� writing is beautiful, her prose flows conversationally and her story-telling gift keeps you engaged until the very last page. The way she describes this London that I had never heard of before (I knew there was a gay community in Victorian London, of course, but I had absolutely no idea what it could have possibly been like) was so fresh, stuffed with fascinating historical details and it never fell into the trap of romanticising the era to pander to the reader. You get the sumptuous gowns and the lovely ball rooms, but you also get the filth of back alleys and cheap boarding houses: the city she writes is a palpable and lively setting for her unconventional story.

Yes, there is sex in the book, and yes, it occasionally gets explicit. But I’m not sure it makes “Tipping the Velvet�� erotica: a lot more than sex happens in those pages, and some of it is far from titillating. But when there is sex, it’s often more tender than raunchy. So look somewhere else for your smut fix!

Any fan of historical fiction would enjoy this book, even more so if you like the work of dear Mr. Dickens and like me, wished he had been a bit more realistic about his female characters. It’s an entertaining, daring, touching and satisfying novel that I warmly recommend to everyone.