Tipping the Velvet and her two following novels also set in the Victorian era—Affinity and Fingersmith—is establishing a literary tradition that has not existed: "Women engaging in same-sex relationships in the Victorian era were on the whole invisible and we have little knowledge of their literary interests." Waters, however, acknowledges that accuracy about lesbian life in the Victorian era is not her primary goal: "My purpose was not to be authentic, but to imagine a history that we can’t really recover." Short bursts of lesbian-themed literary activity occurred in 1920s with authors such as Natalie Clifford Barney and Djuna Barnes. Another surge of activity published as lesbian pulp fiction occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s, during which several notable lesbian authors such as Ann Bannon and Valerie Taylor helped to establish lesbian literary identity. These fictions helped to inform readers about the lives and cultural landmarks of lesbians when very little information existed. Waters states that she is not on a deliberate crusade to write about lesbians, but that it is a reflection of what she knows: "Lesbianism is at the top of the agenda for my books because it's at the top of the agenda for my life. It would be bizarre not to write about it." In 2009, as she reflected on her reasons for writing Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, Waters said she was searching for her own identity as a lesbian writer. Among Waters' Victorian-set novels, depictions of sexual encounters are also, according to Palmer, the most vivid in Tipping the Velvet. A review in The Advocate calls the book "riotously sexy", and The Seattle Times suggests the scene where Nan shows Kitty how to open and eat an oyster is evocative of Tom Jones. This follows a marked difference in recently written fiction by and for lesbians. Frank depictions of lesbian sexuality specifically penned by women have been quieted by censorship that equated lesbian sex with aberrant mental behaviour, or employed it as an erotic element controlled by, and for the benefit of, men. Lesbian literary scholar Bonnie Zimmerman writes, "Lesbians have been reticent and uncomfortable about sexual writing in part because we wish to reject the patriarchal stereotype of the lesbian as a voracious sexual vampire who spends all her time in bed. It is safer to be a lesbian if sex is kept in the closet or under the covers. We don’t