Fingersmith (novel)
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| Author | Sarah Waters |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Crime novel |
| Publisher | Virago Press |
| Released | 4 February 2002 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 416 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1-86049-882-5 (first edition, hardback) |
| Preceded by | Tipping the Velvet; Affinity |
| Followed by | The Night Watch |
Fingersmith is a 2002 crime fiction novel by Sarah Waters.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The story takes place in Victorian England. Susan Trinder, a seventeen-year-old orphan from the London Borough, agrees to help a shamed gentleman (Richard Rivers) to defraud a wealthy heiress.
[edit] Explanation of the novel's title
A fingersmith is a petty thief; the novel's protagonist, Sue, makes a living as a fingersmith in London. "Fingersmith" may also mean a person who has a mastered a skill involving the use of their hands; Maud is a secretary for her Uncle, Mr. Lilly.
[edit] Plot summary
[edit] Part one
Sue Trinder, an orphan raised in 'a Fagin-like den of thieves' by her adoptive mother, Mrs. Sucksby, is sent to help Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers seduce a wealthy heiress. Posing as a maid, Sue is to gain the trust of the lady, Maud Lilly, and eventually persuade her to elope with Gentleman. Once they are married, Gentleman plans to commit Maud to a madhouse and claim her fortune for himself.
Sue travels to Maud's secluded home in the country, Briar, where she lives a sheltered life under the care of her uncle, Christopher Lilly. Like Sue, Maud was orphaned at birth; her mother died in a mental asylum, and she has never known her father. Her uncle uses her as a secretary to assist him in compiling a dictionary, and keeps her to the house, working with him in the silence of his library.
Sue and Maud forge an unlikely friendship, which develops into a mutual physical passion; after a time, Sue realizes she has fallen in love with Maud, and begins to regret her involvement in Gentleman's plot. Though deeply distressed, but feeling she has no choice, Sue persuades Maud to marry Gentleman, and the trio flee from Briar to a nearby church, where the two are hastily betrothed in a midnight ceremony.
Making a temporary home in a local cottage, and telling Maud they are simply waiting for their affairs to be brought to order in London, Gentleman and a reluctant Sue make arrangements for Maud to be committed to an asylum for the insane; her health has already waned as a result of the shock of leaving her quiet life at Briar, to Gentleman's delight. After a week, he and Sue escort an oblivious Maud to the asylum in a closed carriage. However, the doctors apprehend Sue on arrival, and from the cold reactions of Gentleman and the seemingly innocent Maud, Sue guesses that it is she who has been conned: "That bitch knew everything. She had been in on it from the start."
[edit] Part two
In the second part of the novel, Maud takes over the narrative. She describes her early life being raised by the nurses in the mental asylum where her mother died, and the sudden appearance of her uncle when she was ten, who arrives to take her to Briar to be his secretary.
Her induction into his rigid way of life is brutal; Maud is made to wear gloves constantly to preserve the surfaces of the books she is working on, and is denied food when she tires of labouring with her uncle in his library. Distressed, and missing her previous home, Maud begins to demonstrate sadistic tendencies, biting and kicking her maid, Agnes, and her abusive carer, Mrs Stiles. She harbours a deep resentment toward her mother for abandoning her, and develops a bizarre ritual of holding her mother's locket every night, and whispering to it how much she hates her.
Shockingly, Maud reveals that her uncle's work is not to compile a dictionary, but to assemble a bibliography of literary pornography, for the reference of future generations. In his own words, Christopher Lilly is a 'curator of poisons'. He introduces Maud to the keeping of the books- indexing them and such- when she is barely twelve, and deadens her reactions to the shocking material. As she grows older, Maud reads the material out for the appreciation of her uncle's colleagues. On one occasion, when asked by one of them how she can stand to curate such things, Maud answers, "I was bred to the task, as servants are."
She has resigned herself to a life serving her uncle's obscure ambition, when Richard Rivers arrives at Briar. He familiarises her with a plan to escape her exile in Briar; a plan involving the deception of a commonplace girl who will believe she had been sent to Briar to trick Maud out of her inheritance. After initial hesitation, Maud agrees to the plan, and receives Sue weeks later, pretending to know nothing about the plot.
Maud falls in love with Sue over time and, like Sue, begins to question whether she will be able to carry out Gentleman's plot as planned. Though overcome with guilt, Maud does, and travels with Gentleman to London after committing Sue to the asylum, claiming to the doctors that Sue was the mad Mrs Maud Rivers who believed she was a commonplace girl.
Instead of taking Maud to a house in Chelsea, as he had promised, Gentleman takes her to Mrs Sucksby in the Borough. It was, it turns out, Gentleman's plan to bring her here all along; and, Mrs Sucksby, who had orchestrated the entire plan, reveals to a stunned Maud that a lady, Marianne Lilly, had come to Lant Street seventeen years earlier, pregnant and alone. When Marianne discovered her cruel father and brother had found her, she begged Mrs Sucksby to take her newborn child and give her one of her 'farmed' infants to take its place. Sue, it turns out, was Marianne Lilly's true daughter, and Maud one of the many orphaned infants who had been placed on Mrs Sucksby's care after being abandoned. By the decree of Marianne's will, written on the night of the switch, both girls were entitled to a share of Marianne Lilly's fortune. By having Sue committed, Mrs Sucksby could intercept her share. She had planned the switch of the two girls for seventeen years, and enlisted the help of Gentleman to bring Maud to her in the weeks before her eighteenth birthday, when she would become legally entitled to the money. By setting Sue up as the 'mad Mrs Rivers', Gentleman could, by law, claim her fortune for himself.
Alone and friendless, Maud has no choice but to remain a prisoner at Lant Street. She makes one attempt to escape to the home of one of her uncle's friends, Mr Hawtrey, but he turns her away, appalled at the scandal that she has fallen into, and anxious to preserve his local reputation. Maud returns to Lant Street and finally submits to the care of Mrs Sucksby. It is then that Mrs Sucksby reveals to her that Maud was not an orphan that she took into her care, as she and Gentleman had told her, but Mrs Sucksby's own daughter.
[edit] Part three
The novel resumes Sue's narrative, picking up where Maud and Gentleman had left her in the mental asylum. Sue is devastated at Maud's betrayal and furious that Gentleman double-crossed her. When she screams to the asylum doctors that she is not Mrs Rivers but her maid Susan, they ignore her, as Gentleman (helped by Maud) has convinced them that that is precisely her delusion, and that she is really Maud Lilly Rivers, his troubled wife.
Sue is treated appallingly by the nurses in the asylum, being subjected to beatings and taunts on a regular basis. Such is her maltreatment and loneliness that, after a time, she begins to fear that she truly has gone mad. Heartbreakingly, she is sustained by the belief that Mrs Sucksby will find and rescue her. Sue dwells on Maud's betrayal, the devastation of which quickly turns to anger.
Sue's chance at freedom comes when Charles, a stable boy from Briar, comes to visit her. He is the nephew, it turns out, of the local woman (Mrs Cream) who owned the cottage the trio had stayed in on the night of Maud and Gentleman's wedding. Charles, a simple boy, had been pining for the charming attentions of Gentleman to such an extent that his father Mr Way had began to beat him, severely. Charles ran away, and had been directed to the asylum by Mrs Cream, who had had no idea of the nature of the place. Sue quickly enlists his help in her escape, persuading him to purchase a blank key and a file to give to her on his next visit. This he does, and Sue, using the skills learnt growing up in the Borough, escapes from the asylum and travels with Charles to London, with the intention of returning to Mrs Sucksby and her home in Lant Street.
On arrival, an astonished Sue sees Maud at her bedroom window. After days of watching the activity of her old home from a nearby boarding house, Sue sends Charles with a letter explaining all to Mrs Sucksby, still believing that it was Maud and Gentleman alone who deceived her. Charles returns, saying Maud intercepted the letter, and sends Sue a playing card- the Two of Hearts, representing lovers-in reply. Sue takes the token as a joke, and storms into the house to confront Maud, half-mad with rage. She tells everything to Mrs Sucksby, who pretends to have known nothing, and despite Mrs Sucksby's repeated attempts to calm her, swears she will kill Maud for what she has done to her. Gentleman arrives, and though initially shocked at Sue's escape, laughingly begins to tell Sue how Mrs Sucksby played her for a fool. Maud physically tries to stop him, knowing how the truth would devastate Sue; a scuffle between Maud, Gentleman and Mrs Sucksby ensues, and in the confusion, Gentleman is stabbed by the knife Sue had taken up to kill Maud, minutes earlier. He bleeds to death. A hysterical Charles alerts the police. Mrs Sucksby, at last sorry for how she has deceived the two girls, immediately confesses to the crime: "Lord knows, I'm sorry for it now; but I done it. And these girls here are innocent girls, and know nothing at all about it; and have harmed no-one."
Mrs Sucksby is sentenced to hang for killing Gentleman, and is executed; it is revealed that Richard Rivers was not a shamed gentleman at all, but a draper's son named Frederick Bunt, who had had ideas above his station. Maud disappears, though Sue sees her briefly at Mrs Sucksby's trial, and gathers from the prison matrons that Maud had been visiting Mrs Sucksby in the days leading up to her death. Sue remains unaware of her true parentage, until she finds the will of Marianne Lilly tucked in the folds of Mrs Sucksby's gown. Realizing everything, an overwhelmed Sue sets out to find Maud, beginning by returning to Briar. It is there she finds Maud, and the nature of Christopher Lilly's work is finally revealed to Sue. It is further revealed that Maud is now writing erotic fiction to sustain herself. The two girls, still very much in love with each other despite everything, make peace and give vent to their feelings at last.
[edit] Characters in Fingersmith
- Susan Trinder - The protagonist of the novel
- Maud Lilly - The heiress whom Sue plans to defraud
- Richard 'Gentleman' Rivers - Partner in crime to both Sue and Maud
- Mrs Sucksby - Adoptive mother of Sue; real mother of Maud
- Mr Ibbs - The crooked pawn seller who runs the 'den of thieves' with Mrs Sucksby
- Christopher Lilly - Maud's 'uncle'; brother of Marianne Lilly
- Dainty - Sue's best friend in Lant Street; a petty thief
- John Vroom - An ill-tempered boy; also a petty thief
- Mrs Stiles - Maud's childhood carer; a bitter woman who never recovered from the loss of her own daughter
- Charles Way - A stable boy at Briar, who becomes ridiculously enamoured with Gentleman
- Mr Way - A servant at Briar; father of Charles
- Agnes - Maud's long-suffering maid, who is seduced by Gentleman in order to make a post available for Sue
- Marianne Lilly - Susan's mother, whom Maud believed to be hers; Christopher Lilly had her committed to an asylum after giving birth, where she died
- Mrs Cream - The owner of the cottage in which Gentleman and Maud stayed in, on the night of their elopement, along with Sue; Charles' aunt.
[edit] Major themes, symbols and motifs
- Hands and Fingers
- Gloves
- Ink and Paint
- Duality
- Pornography in the Victorian Era
- Forbidden Love
- Immoral Practices of Victorian Mental Asylums
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
- In her Notes on the Text, Sarah Waters informs the reader that the index that Christopher Lilly is working upon with the assistance of Maud in the novel is based on bibliographies published by Henry Spencer Ashbee, under the pseudonym Pisanus Fraxi, in the late 1870s. Waters makes it clear that, though Lilly's sentiments on book-keeping echo those of Ashbee, he is in all other aspects entirely fictitious.
- Sarah Waters also states in the Notes that all of the texts cited by Maud in Fingersmith actually existed, and lists their titles accordingly.
[edit] Literary significance and criticism
- "Sarah Waters is one of the best storytellers alive today..." ~Matt Thorne, Independent On Sunday
- "Intensely atmospheric, impeccably paced and cunningly structured, this is that rarity in contemporary fiction: a deeply serious novel that is also a thumping great read." ~Douglas Kennedy, Mail On Sunday
- "There are always novels that you envy people for not yet having read, for the pleasure they still have to come. Well, this is one. Long, dark, twisted and satisfying, it's a fabulous piece of writing...an unforgettable experience." ~Julie Myerson, The Guardian
- Kristine Huntley, writing in the American Library Association's Journal, compared the work to that of Wilkie Collins.
[edit] Awards and nominations
- Shortlisted for the Orange Prize
- Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
- Winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger for Historical Crime Fiction
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
- Fingersmith, starring Sally Hawkins as Susan Trinder, Elaine Cassidy as Maud Lilly, Imelda Staunton as Mrs Sucksby, and Rupert Evans as Gentleman. In this BBC drama the age of the girls is set at twenty-one, though in the book Maud and Sue are seventeen, taking their eighteenth birthday toward the end of the novel.
