Sarah Waters's recreations of Victorian domestic space; or, the lesbians in the attic

In November 2011, the contemporary, award-winning author Sarah Waters was among a plethora of celebrated writers who contributed to the Society of Authors' global Tweetathon to mark National Short Story Week.Waters provided an opening sentence (of no more than one hundred and forty characters) for one of the collaborative creative ventures between writers and tweeters.She wrote: 'My house is a jumpy house.Doors fly open.Windows shudder.There are sighs.Don't come calling!My house has something on its mind' (Waters, 'Ghost Story').As her tweet indicates, Waters uses the evocative potential of domestic spatial boundaries to inspire the literary imagination.From this limited microblog to her larger (triple-decker) novels, spatiality is an important theme and prominent image across her writings.For instance, the suggestive potential of domestic spaces in her writing is given particular prominence in her most recent novel, The Little Stranger (2009), a text set in a country house in the 1940s which concerns the varied yet intimate relationship between socio-cultural status and public and private spaces.However, the connection between the personal and the spatial is also a prevalent feature of her earlier neo-Victorian novels-Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002)-and, as this article will consider, domestic and private spaces are significant to her representation of sexuality.Notably, in their seminal text, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century (2010), Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn describe neo-Victorian fictions as those 'self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians' (4).Since the last decade of the twentieth century, authors in this flourishing genre have revisited the literary, artistic, socio-cultural and historical ideologies of the nineteenth century, re-imagining Victorian ideals in a plethora of new and creative guises.Waters is one of the most acclaimed authors in this field who is celebrated for her focus on women and female same-sex passions, and her writings have begun to receive substantive academic attention discussing the myriad ways in which she rewrites the Victorians.However, in considering the relevance of spatiality to her work, to date scholars have largely focused on Waters's representation of nineteenth-century spatial dynamics in

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