The Guardian runs a long profile of Sarah Waters on the British publication of The Little Stranger
.
Go ahead and indulge your UK envy because I don't think a US newspaper
is likely to connect the dots and discuss literature in terms of
lesbian legacies and heirs.
As polar opposites, Winterson and Waters define two utterly contrasting
literary lesbian identities. In the past, the literary grandes dames of
the 20th century were larger-than-life figures as complex as Radclyffe
Hall and Djuna Barnes or as frankly posh and exotic as Daphne du
Maurier. Waters, who has the potential, and perhaps the appetite, to
achieve a du Maurier audience, is not like that. She is at pains to
stress her ordinariness. "I think I'm an unhysterical person," she
says. "I do see myself as normal." Everything about her situation here
advertises normality. "But," she goes on, "I think that what's behind
normality is very interesting."
The interview also includes this passage, which you may have heard before:
"All my neuroticism goes into the books," she says. "I've always
thought of myself as a writer," she adds, "but I'm happy with the
lesbian label. I think it's important to be visible." But not
flamboyant. Waters's life in sunny Lambeth is discreet, unassuming and
contented. She lives with two cats and her partner of seven years, Lucy
Vaughan, who works for a TV listings company and has, she jokes, "far
more readers than I do".
Doing what she can for lesbian visibility, Waters also recently spoke with The Wall St Journal, Now magazine in Toronto, After Ellen in New York, and Bay Windows in Boston. To her immense credit, she answers the same questions in a fresh way each time.
Adding to that UK envy, BBC2 announced it will adapt Waters' fourth novel, The Night Watch
,
into a 90 minute film. All three of her exclusively lesbian novels
before that have already been televised to critical and popular
acclaim; two of them were three-part miniseries. Now name an American
writer whose entire output of gay books has been broadcast in prime
time. (Tales of the City was adapted by the UK's Channel 4, not PBS, which caved to protests and bailed on the sequels, later done by Showtime.)
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