![]() ![]() Nancy, calling herself Nan King, joins Kitty’s act, and together they win moderate renown as a pair of mashers (girls dressed as boys who perform on the stage). The two get to know one another, and eventually Kitty reciprocates. When she is eighteen, she first sees the male-impersonator singer-dancer Kitty Butler, and falls in love with her. Nancy, who spends her days shucking oysters, visits music halls at night for entertainment. And in a nutshell, or an oyster shell if you will, these are the themes of Waters’ debut novel. And finally, oysters produce pearls, products of the oyster’s response to foreign material trapped inside the outer protective layer. Not only that, but oysters can change their sex one or more times during their life spans. Oysters, long thought to be an aphrodisiac, have an even more important quality: there is no way to distinguish male oysters from females by looking at their shells. ![]() ![]() This is an apt introduction to this story about gender bending, sexuality, and lesbian practices in late Victorian England. Her family runs this eating establishment that specializes in Whitstable oysters, or “natives,” which are “the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the sublest, oysters in the whole of England.” The narrator of this book, Nancy Astley, began her life in an oyster-parlour on the Kentish coast in 1870. ![]()
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