Many twists and turns follow in the remaining two parts. When Sue falls in love with her mistress she nevertheless goes through with the plot-and that’s just Part One. In Waters’ story, the heroine Sue is a female pickpocket raised by a Dickensian gang of thieves she collaborates with a male con man, Gentleman, to seduce a wealthy heiress in her remote country estate, elope with her and abscond with her fortune after committing her to a madhouse. While Sarah Waters was thrilled with the 2005 adaptation by the BBC, it’s not known what she thinks of Park’s cinematic outing. In The Handmaiden, Park cleverly maps those master-servant tensions onto an Asian colonial context to stunning effect.

It was ranked by David Bowie as one of his top 100 books, and South Korean film director Park Chan-wook was inspired by its visceral scenes (one in particular, where the “maid” Sue grinds down one of her mistress’s teeth using a thimble), and felt compelled to make it into his next movie, The Handmaiden.Īccording to an interview with The Guardian Park didn’t know the BBC adaptation existed, and when he found out, he resolved to transplant it from its British soil to 1930s Japan-a period which had its own Victorian-type constraints via a final flourishing of imperialist power.Īt that time, Korea -like much of the region -was challenged by or under Japanese imperialist rule, and while Japan looked down upon Korea, it looked enviously to the West. Fingersmith, her third novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and while we could call it a lesbian novel, being both written by and about lesbians, it is also a work greatly admired by men. A psychological thriller ‘The Handmaiden’ from South Korea adapted from a Sarah Waters novel.Īward-winning novelist Sarah Waters first caught the attention of literary lesbians with Tipping the Velvet, a work of historical fiction that found and traced the deeply embedded lesbian veins of Victorian England. A psychological thriller ‘The Handmaiden’ from South Korea adapted from a Sarah Waters novel.

Handmaiden sarah waters