Book Review: Fingersmith

I first read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters in the early days of my coming out. I was fifteen, and I was used to books about lesbians that dealt with secrecy, shame, and the horrible stigma of being a lesbian. This book has plenty of secrecy and shame, but the lesbian stigma is refreshingly absent. As a baby lesbian this made Fingersmith one of the least traumatic books I read, and I desperately needed to see my sexuality as something that I didn’t need to be ashamed of. 

But Fingersmith is so much more than a “lesbian book”. It’s a wonderful, thrilling suspense novel. It has all my favorite Victorian tropes: an asylum, a depressing, forbidding manor, and London’s sooty, filthy, lurid underbelly. The three-part plot is breathtaking. Now, fifteen years after first reading Fingersmith, I was driven to stay up late and read until the words were running down the page. There are delicious cliff-hangers at the end of the first two parts, both calling up so many questions that are answered in the following part. Waters wraps up the many, many questions neatly without info-dumping. 

The characterization is amazing. The two main characters, Susan and Maud, are multi-faceted and deep. I was made to care for both of them. Even the small side characters are vivid and fully-formed. There is a character named Dainty who is seen by the main characters as a simpleton who allows herself to be ill-treated. Without subtracting from the main plot, Dainty’s personality and circumstances are sprinkled into the story, so that we have a full portrait of this red-headed, miserable girl who provides steady support and loyalty throughout the book.

Fingersmith would not be the same without the lush settings. Waters provides so much detail without overloading or detracting from the story. When the characters walk through London my throat grew dusty and sooty along with theirs, I felt the need for a shower after the description of the sorry boardinghouse with drunkards in the stairwell and black hairs in the bed.  

Fingersmith will always be one of my favorite books. It’s so nice to revisit an old favorite and find that it holds up, and boy, did Fingersmith hold up! 5/5