Title: Fingersmith
Author: Sarah Waters
Context: Fingersmith (2002) is a historical crime novel set in England during the Victorian Era in the 1800s by the author, Sarah Waters. The tale is about an orphan, Sue Trinder and how she finds that nothing and no one at all is at it seems. Fingersmith is indeed a novel of reversals and thrills.
Synopsis: The orphan Sue Trinder, as an infant is kept under the care of a ‘bay farmer’ Mrs.Sucksby. She takes care of Sue with extraordinary tenderness, in a way that that she was her very own child. Her house hosts not only a number of fussy babies smoothened with doses of gin, but also a transient family of small thieves – Fingersmith for whom this house located in the heart of a mean slum in London is their home.
It so happens that on a particular day, an elegant conman, Gentleman – the most loved thief of all arrives. He approaches Sue with an alluring proposition; that is if she won the position of maid to a naïve gentlewoman called Maud Lilly, and assists him in seducing her, then Sue will get a share in the huge inheritance of Maud. After the inheritance is acquired, then Maud will have to be termed as insane, disposed off of to spend the remaining days of her life in a lunatic asylum.
Sue agrees and accepts the plan as she has dreamt of paying back the kindness of her adopted family. However, when Sue is once in, she starts feeling sorry for Maud Lilly in ways she had never expected.
Other works by the Author:
1998 – Tipping the Velvet
1999 – Affinity
2006 – The Night Watch
2009 – The Little Stranger
2014 – The Paying Guests