SARAH WATERS.

Tipping the Velvet

A major talent debuts with a sexy romp through the lesbian boudoirs of Victorian London

Warning: Do not open Tipping the Velvet (Riverhead Books, $25.95) if you have calls to make, clothes to launder, or deadlines to meet. Just give up and head for the beach until you finish this riotously sexy epic of lesbian London at the dawn of the 20th century.

How sexy? Consider the book's title--Victorian slang for pleasuring a lady orally. The lady who unearthed that expression and a bawdy world to go with it is Welshborn Sarah Waters. Her debut novel, already a hit in Britain and newly available in the United States, keeps raking in reviews that always seem to include the words "lesbian classic."

Waters, 32, sports an exotic mix of talents. A spellbinding storyteller, she is also an academic who did her dissertation on lesbian and gay literature. Working on her Ph.D., she recalls, "I got impatient with academic discourse. I just wanted to be able to sit and make things up."

Specifically, she wanted to give life to the Victorian women she saw in her mind. "Period novels tend to reproduce the Patience and Sarah kind of thing," she explains. "Two women rather isolated, probably living in the country, coming together against all odds and setting up life together in a small-scale sort of way. I just thought, God, there's so much more to lesbian history than that."

Waters knew, for instance, that in England's turn-of-the-century music halls, women who impersonated men were among the most popular entertainers. But around 1920 the specialty suddenly died out. Why? Waters concluded that the dawning awareness of lesbian sexuality made male impersonation seem suddenly shameful.

With that she began to sketch the idea of hot forbidden love between male impersonator Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley, a gutsy young lesbian--or "tom," in the slang of the day--who makes her way to wicked London, rises to stardom as Kitty's onstage partner, and ... well, there's a lot more.

Rest assured, Waters is not done with lesbian lore. She has just published the English edition of her second historical novel, Affinity. "It's quite dark and gothic," she says. "Women in prison and that sort of thing."

Blimey! We're shivering already.