Affinity [Hardcover]

Sarah Waters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000

A spellbinding ghost story set in Victorian London.

Greeted with enthusiastic praise, Sarah Waters's debut novel, Tipping the Velvet, was lauded as "amazing" and "delightful" (Salon.com), "buoyant and accomplished" (The New York Times Book Review), "glorious" (The Boston Globe), and "wonderful" (San Francisco Chronicle). Critics compared her to Jeannette Winterson, adding that "readers of all sexes and orientations should identify" with Waters's unforgettable nineteenth-century heroines. Now, Sarah Waters brilliantly returns with Affinity--a haunting ghost story and Guardian (London) bestseller that has left British reviewers "transfixed with horror and excitement" (Daily Mail, London).

An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women's ward of Millbank prison, London's grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank's murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by one apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Initially skeptical of Selina's gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of sances and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last persuaded to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina's freedom.

A pulse-quickening read by a remarkably talented writer, Affinity is a sophisticated and spine-tingling historical mystery awash with the scenes, sights, and smells of nineteenth-century London.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Affinity is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire. In her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing--capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling.

In late September 1874, Margaret Prior makes her way through the pentagons of London's Millbank Prison, a place of fearful symmetry and endless corridors. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. And our Lady Visitor plans to take her role dead seriously, having recovered from two years of nervous indolence in her family's Chelsea house. One person, however, makes her job a passion. Opening an inspection slit (or "eye" as these devices are known), Margaret hears "a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story." Peering inward, she's confronted by the most erotic of visions--a woman turned toward the sun, caressing her cheek with a forbidden violet: "As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."

Selina Dawes may indeed have the face of a Crivelli angel, but this medium is in for fraud and assault, her last session having gone very badly indeed. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. "You think spiritualism a kind of fancy," Selina riddles. "Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?" And soon enough Margaret receives several viable signs of the supernatural: a locket disappears from her room, flowers mysteriously appear, and her dazzling friend knows everything about her. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.

As Margaret records her weekly prison forays, her own past comes into focus, notably her plans to travel to Italy with her first love (who is now her sister-in-law). But her current journal, she convinces herself, is to be very different from her last one, which "took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take." Meanwhile, Waters offers a narrative two-for-one, placing Margaret's diary cheek by jowl with Selina's chronicle of her pre-Millbank existence. This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality--that knowledge and belief are entirely different things. --Kerry Fried

From The New Yorker

Her first, Tipping the Velvet, was good; her second is just terrific. Moody, haunting, and haunted (it's about love among Victorian spiritualists), Affinity is two parts Wilkie Collins, with whose The Woman in White it shares an obsession with prisons, madness, journal-keeping, and elaborate, carefully engineered deceits; and just a dash of Jeanette Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor. ("He, she--you ought to know that in the spheres there are no differences like that.")

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573221562
• ISBN-13: 978-1573221566
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #837,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Waters is the bestselling author of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch. Winner of many literary awards, she has been shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Marvelous Novel, June 1, 2000

By 

P. Ducharme (Québec, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Affinity (Hardcover)

If you have read "Tipping the Velvet", you know that Sarah Waters is a talented author. In that first novel, we discovered a lesbian author able to put up some good sex scenes. So, maybe she was a great lesbian author, maybe she was a good author of erotic books (not pornographic, by the way). But can she be more than that?

I was so anxious to know for sure, that I bought "Affinity" from Amazon.co.uk in January 2001 (Sarah Waters being a english author, I was right thinking that she would be published in U.K. before being published in U.S.A.). I was not disapointed.

Although my english is not that good, I fully appreciated this novel. "Affinity" is not an erotic novel. There is love, but not sex, and the fact that the love is between two women is not the main feature. I don't want to make a complete résumé because I think it is difficult to do so without spoiling the pleasure you'll have reading it until the end.

Let's just say that this novel is about a sad young woman who desperately need to be loved, who is desperately ready to believe in love and who thinks that she had find it while visiting a prison in London, in 1874. This is not a funny or a "feeling-good" book. But Sarah Waters knows how to make you feel, smell, taste and see the life of a woman who would have live 125 years ago.

Now I know: Sarah Waters is a great author. Don't read "Affinity" because you think that it is a sex book (it is not). Don't read it because you think Sarah Waters is a lesbian. Read it because it is a great book. The best I've read in a long time. Believe me, I'll wait for her next book.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine Writing, Great Story, August 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Affinity (Hardcover)

Waters successfully brings the Victorian era to life in this story of an emotionally vulnerable "spinster",Margaret Prior, who attempts to overcome the losses of loved ones by taking up charitable social work with the women of Millbank prison in London. Her relationship with Selina Dawes, a spiritualist imprisoned for fraud and assault, progresses from mere fascination to blind passion, and the reader is pulled along with her in her quest for love and purpose in a world which has deprived her of the opportunity to achieve either. The cold, damp and dreary setting of London and Millbank Prison is a fitting backdrop to this story of Margaret, who much like the women to whom she ministers, is herself imprisoned and nearly destroyed by the repressive social structures of her day. The book is written mostly as excerpts from Margaret's diary. Interspersed among these are brief excerpts from the diary of Selina Dawes, the spiritualist. This technique works brilliantly, because it creates more of a challenge for the reader to distinguish between the inner reality of the characters and the objective reality of the story. It also makes the ending much more dramatic. Read it, by all means. It's a bit of a slow go at first, but the build up is necessary to the progression of the story.

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not an easy read....thought provoking!, April 27, 2002

By 

Barbara "Queen of her castle AND her home lib... (beautiful Charleston, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Affinity (Hardcover)

Wow!
What a story!
The writing is excellent. I could feel the dampness of the Victorian prison. I could visualize the dank, thick, stone walls which housed the prisoners.
Here's a story of spirits and psychic mediums.
Margaret takes on the volunteer work of a Lady Visitor of the women's prison. She is quite obsessed with the place and takes her duties seriously.
Margaret meets and is very intrgued by Selena Dawes, a woman in prison for fraud. Margaret has tender feelings in her heart for the unfair, brutal treatment of Selena and the other women imprisoned.
This is a very good book telling a very different type of story.
The ending of this story is a breath taking surprise!
I recommend reading this book, but it is not a light read. It will make you think and it's a terrific book to discuss with others.
This is an eye opener of a story.
Outstanding writing!