Fingersmith Literary Elements

Historical fiction/novel

Victorian-era London, but with an emphasis on that setting as derived from popular fiction more than historical accuracy.

The novel is famous split into three parts with the first and third narrated by Sue Trinder and the middle section narrated by Maud.

The tone of the novel is extraordinarily complex. Part one is a strange mixture of irony and sincerity. Part two reveals that the sincerity of part one was actually ironic and that the irony of part one was doubly ironic. Part three almost completely embraces sincerity and jettisons irony until the very end. The mood throughout is one of increasingly tense anxiety.

Protagonists: Sue Tinder and Maud Lilly. Antagonists: Christopher Lilly, Mrs. Sucksby.

At the heart of the complex series of events which take place over a long span of time is the machinations by Mrs. Sucksby to gain possession of Marianne Lilly’s fortune which her will decreed be divided equally between Sue and Maud.

The novel climaxes with the revelation of all the deceptions and criminal machinations lead to Sue killing Gentleman and Mrs. Sucksby confessing to the crime in on last act of deception.

In a stunning display of audacity, the author foreshadows all the many plot twists to come which have already made the novel legendary, by the third paragraph of the book with a description of by the narrator of attending a stage performance of a Charles Dickens novel: Oliver Twist (all of her twists).

The novel is divided into three parts. The conclusion to Part One has risen to become one of the most unexpected and shocking plot twists of 21st century literature. The understated way in which twist begins makes it all the more shocking: “`Mrs Rivers, you remember me of course?’ He held out his hand. He held it to me.”

The Lilly family manor where Uncle Charles is holding Maud a prisoner is named Briar. That name and the circumstances of Maud’s existence both server to create an allusion to the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty who is also known as Briar Rose.

The book at one level is an examination of the profound power of the written word over people. This is made explicit when a doctor at the asylum attributes Sue’s factual accounts of the circumstances which led her to being committed—circumstances the doctor believes must be delusions—to reading too much: “Fancies, Mrs Rivers. If you might only hear yourself! Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction! We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to overindulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”

The story concludes on a jarring paradox: Maud, having been forced against her will to indulge in the pornographic obsessions of Charles, earns her living by writing pornographic stories.

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A major character is referred throughout with a synecdoche as nickname that has double meaning because it turns out, of course, that the reasoning behind the nickname is yet another of the story’s voluminous cases of deception: “His name was Richard Rivers, or Dick Rivers, or sometimes Richard Wells. We called him by another name, however; and it was that name I said now…Gentleman.”

Sue kissing Maud: “It was like kissing the darkness. As if the darkness had life, had a shape, had taste, was warm and glib.”