Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet is the first novel by the Welsh writer Sarah Waters, published in 1998. It is a historical novel set in England in the 1890s, and it tells a coming-of-age story about a young woman named Nan who falls in love with a male impersonator and goes with her to London.

Nan King is an oyster girl in Whitstable when she sees Kitty Butler on the stage, and the two become friends and then partners, in the act and privately. The novel follows Nan from the theatre into parts of the city she had not seen before, taking her through the music halls, a wealthy household and the streets, with each stage changing what she is able to do for herself.

Waters writes the period through its slang, its dress and its small rules, and the book was one of the first mainstream novels to put a lesbian relationship at the centre of a Victorian setting. Its three sections each place Nan in a different household, which is the book's structure as well as its plot.