This issue features a “micro-interview” with Sarah Waters, conducted by Peter Terzian. Waters is a British writer who has written five historical novels. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002) loosely form a trilogy in which Waters imagines a lesbian subculture in Victorian London, located in, respectively, a music hall, spiritualists’ circles, and the den of petty thieves. Each features a lesbian heroine coming to terms with her identity, often while fending off larger-than-life Dickensian villains and tricksters. The Night Watch (2005) is set in the cheerless British capital during and after the Blitz, and follows the unhappy romantic lives of four women (including a lesbian love triangle) and a gay man. Her new novel, The Little Stranger, is a return to the Gothic realm of her earliest books. Her first to include no lesbian characters, it takes place at a crumbling rural mansion in the years after the war. As the Ayres family struggles to stay afloat financially and emotionally, unidentified supernatural forces begin to drive them to the brink of sanity.

SARAH WATERS MICROINTERVIEW, PART I.

THE BELIEVER: You’ve had BBC films made of three of your five novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith. An adaptation of The Night Watch is in the works. Has seeing your novels become such an establish presence on British television—and on gay cable channels in the U.S.—had any effect on your writing?

SARAH WATERS: I would be lying if I said I never thought while I’m writing something that it might be adapted, because so many of my books have. But I can honestly say it hasn’t affected the way I’ve written at all. I really felt while I was writing The Night Watch that  nobody would want to adapt it. Technically it was complicated and it was too gloomy. But it didn’t make me  not want to write that book in that way. I feel slightly unnerved by the books all being adapted. I feel that  people are just going to get sick of me: “Oh no, not more lesbians in period costume.” I remember very distinctly there was a point at which if I met somebody and they knew my name it was because they knew my books. And suddenly there was a point when people knew my name and they hadn’t read my books. And it was because my name was suddenly in circulation because of the TV things.  That was an unnerving experience. It was like something was slipping away from my control. It would be  dreadful if people were put off reading my books by ...