A chaste take on those naughty Victorians.

Jay, Karla

KARLA JAY

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters

Riverhead. 503 pages, $24.95

SARAH Waters is the brightest light to shine on lesbian fiction since her sister Brit Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene in 1985 with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Let's hope that with all the awards that have already been showered on Waters, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and the American Library Association GLBT Award, she doesn't develop into a self-aggrandizing enfant terrible like Winterson.

Winterson and other fine British lesbian writers of the 1980's, such as Anna Livia, favored "feminist realism"--the use of fanciful mythical or fairytale tropes in their narratives. In contrast, Waters's novels all take place in 19th-century England. Unlike the popular genre in this country, Waters doesn't focus on transformative historical events, such as wars, or on family sagas. Instead, she uses history as a backdrop against which colorful and compelling female characters live out their lives on small but atypical canvases. Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1999) followed the adventures of Nancy, an 1890's musical hall artist, whose career as a singer in male clothing is followed, after an amorous misadventure, by a stint as a transgendered rent boy. Affinity (2000) is set in an 1874 prison. Fingersmith, a slang term for a thief, opens with young Sue, one of the protagonists, being terrified by a production of Oliver Twist (adapted from the novel, which was published in 183738); however, most of the ac tion takes place a decade later when Sue is seventeen. Clearly, Waters's doctoral study on historical novels has paid off better than most dissertations!

Though reviews have compared Waters's novel to the work of Dickens, they've missed the sly trick the author plays on readers by the opening allusion to Oliver Twist, which sets the time, but not the subject matter (except that both protagonists are orphans of sorts). There are Dickensian elements, such as a house that would have made Miss Haversham feel right at home, and a snake pit of a mental institution that could have given birth to many of the Victorian author's legendary characters. There are Dickensian names like Mrs. Cream and Mrs. Sucksby and appropriately named homes like Briar. There are enough twists, turns, and startling coincidences to have made any Victorian novelist proud. However, Waters eschews Dickens's broad canvas as well as his use of realistic fiction to investigate social evils. Instead, Fingersmith succeeds where Dickens failed: He was, to be blunt, quite inept at creating a range of female characters. Of course, he couldn't have created a female bildungsroman equivalent of David Cop perfield or Great Expectations, since women were rarely given the opportunity to develop their lives back then. Dickens's women are all either Angels of the House or devouring monsters. And so with a wink at Dickens, Waters actually owes more to the works of the Bronte sisters and to the female Gothic in general, for the dark houses, ominous male figures, and interior settings speak to the lives and imaginings of women.

As with a work by Dickens, the reviewer's challenge is to offer enough of the plot without giving too much away. Fingersmith is the dual narrative of Maud, a woman of the gentry, and Sue, an orphan raised by a London family of thieves, con artists, and fences. Sue becomes Maud's ladies maid in order to help fellow con artist Richard elope with Maud. Afterwards, Richard and Sue plan to have Maud incarcerated in an insane asylum while they make off with her ample fortune. Meanwhile, Maud's uncle and guardian is working on an index of his huge collection of pornography. Still, Fingersmith itself is relatively chaste, despite the punning possibilities of its title. Tipping the Velvet, in contrast, which is set several decades later, was filled with lusty encounters. Waters appears to be reflecting the social constructionist view that women prior to the late 1850's lacked a language for same-sex love. Sue and Maud have no words for their attraction. "Like it, do you?" one might say, but there are no terms to defin e the "it" in question. By the 1890's, Waters's homoerotic characters have a variety of colorful slang terms with which to define themselves.

This is not to suggest that the book is entirely sexless--or historically accurate. At times, the dialogue sounds glaringly modem. We are also left to wonder how illiterate Sue tells her story so fluently. But never mind: the historicity seems beside the point as readers are swept up in the swirling plots. Another minor flaw is that the double first-person narratives of Sue and Maud inevitably overlap and thus become repetitive--though there is some delightful irony when we get Maud's side of the story. Waters also has a tendency to lead the reader with statements about what's to come. For instance, Sue says, "Perhaps I only think that now, when I know what dark and fearful things were to follow." Quibbles aside, Waters is a magical writer and Fingersmith is a real page turner, a perfect summer read.

Karla Jay is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pace University. She is currently at work on a collection of satires entitled "Migrant Laborers in the Fields of Academe."