Tipping the velvet book6/24/2023 ![]() One New Zealand bookshop kept its early copies shrink-wrapped, with a “Restricted to persons aged 18 and over” sticker on them. Some were drawn to it, I’m sure, as a racy curiosity. ![]() But the success of the novel among straighter readers took me by surprise. I had hoped that lesbians might like it – and was thrilled when, very quickly, helped along by word of mouth, Tipping the Velvet began to find enthusiastic gay fans. And then there was the plot itself – because, oh dear, how lurid it sounded, how improbable, above all how niche, the tale of a Victorian oyster girl who loses her heart to a male impersonator, becomes her partner in bed and on the music hall stage, and then, cruelly abandoned, has a spell as a cross-dressed Piccadilly prostitute and the sexual plaything of a rich older woman before finding true love and redemption with an East End socialist. There was the fact that I outed myself the moment I began to reveal the plot. ![]() ![]() ![]() There was the awkwardness of explaining the rather risque title. “W hat’s it about?” people sometimes asked me, when they had heard I’d written a novel – and I always had to brace myself, slightly, to answer. ![]()
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