Weaving a life of love and death in London

The 1920s trial of Thompson-Bywaters is the subject of Sarah Waters' new book

A few years ago, the British novelist Sarah Waters was playing around with ideas for her next book when she remembered a notorious 1920s trial she had once read about. Known popularly as the Thompson-Bywaters case, it featured a penny dreadful's worth of combustible ingredients: an unexciting husband, a faithless wife, her much younger lover and a cache of racy, damning love letters.

That was the spark that eventually became The Paying Guests, Waters's sixth novel, which she calls "a love story complicated by crime." It is both things and more, with a further complication, in that the romance is between two women, as is often the case in Waters's books.

"I thought how interesting it would be if the lover was a female lover," Waters said in an interview to New York Times in July. She settled on the 1920s, she said, because it was such a fertile time: an era of great disillusionment and also great promise, when an old world was falling away and a new one was emerging.

"It's that shift, that moment of modernity," Waters says. "The impact of the First World War was to shake things up enormously, loosening up old mores, fashions and behaviours. The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side."

She is a perennial best seller and award winner; three of her books have appeared on the Man Booker Prize shortlist; and reviewers tend to love her, though the response to The Paying Guests, which came out on August 28 in Britain and is being published in the United States by Riverhead Books, has been somewhat more mixed than usual. In a glowing review in The Financial Times, the novelist and critic Charlotte Mendelson called it something close to a masterpiece.

Waters has tended to receive less critical attention in the United States than at home. Laura Miller, who wrote a review of her novel The Little Stranger for Salon, said that might be because she has fallen, unfairly, into a genre ghetto.

Set in 1922, The Paying Guests tells the story of Frances, unmarried and dangerously near her late 20s, who lives with her mother in an unwieldy London house suited to a different time. The men are dead. The money has run out. Frances's wartime sub rosa affair with another woman is over. Life is a struggle to keep up appearances, fend off creditors, attend to the drudgery of housekeeping and squeeze pleasures from small things. Unable to relinquish the old life she clings to, Frances's mother refers to the lodgers they are forced to take in - Leonard Barber and his voluptuous wife, Lilian, several notches in class below them - as "paying guests." But things change, twice. Frances falls into a blissful, ecstatically described affair with Lilian, and the love story begins. Then the book takes a shocking turn, and the crime, or the possible crime, comes in.

Waters didn't really set out to be a novelist, nor, in truth, did she know right away she was a lesbian. She grew up in a small town in Wales, where there was minimal acknowledgment of gayness, let alone gayness involving women. Waters had a boyfriend who, she notes, "was a nontraditional bloke as well" - he turned out to be gay, too.

She had a girlfriend - secretly - in college, and then came out in earnest in the late '80s. She moved to London, found a room in a "lesbian group house," wrote for lesbian publications and was swept up in an political movement.

She wrote her first book, Tipping the Velvet, its title a Victorian slang term for cunnilingus, as an "adventure," she says, after writing her doctoral thesis on lesbian and gay historical fictions from the late 19th century onward. She was in her 20s, teaching and supplementing her income with the dole, "and I was still young enough to think that 'this will be a lark, writing a novel,' " she says.

Waters has succeeded in having it both ways, writing mainstream novels that happen to have lesbians in them. "It's still exciting to me and somehow important to me to be putting lesbians at the centre of the story - to be writing historical fiction that is hopefully kind of complicating our sense of the past," she said.

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