Straitened circumstances

There are more lesbians in fiction than you could shake a stick at, of course. Graham Robb, writing about late 19th-century fict- ional lesbians, has observed that

the fin-de-siècle lesbian was educated at a boarding school or a convent. She was frighteningly self-possessed, wore dark colours, read novels, smoked cigars, injected morphine or inhaled ether, suffered from excess hair except on the head, spent too much time in conditions suitable for tropical plants, and was prone to horrible diseases.


She was such a common figure that historians are able to make generalisations about the usual descriptors.

Still, when Sarah Waters started her delectable career with three novels about lesbians in the belle époque, one had the sense of a gap being filled. These novels told of an aspect of 19th-century human behaviour which the 19th-century novel never found a way fully to encompass. Still more enchanting was her wartime and postwar novel, The Night Watch, which thought its way very thoroughly into a social milieu only narrowly rendered by novelists of the time. The butch dyke who was accepted by society during the war, when in uniform, and afterwards retreating to be an object of ridicule was that rare thing, an entirely original fictional type.

Her fifth novel is going to be fallen on by legions of fans, of which I happily declare myself to be one. I don’t know how to break this, though: there are no lesbians in it. Not one. Brixton, Hackney and Hebden Bridge are bereft. How could she! She has taken the opportunity to tease her devoted readers with one of her main characters, Caroline, who has

mismatched masculine features … with some sort of commission in the Wrens ….