 When Sarah Waters was 19 years old , she joined a student house in Whitstable , Kent , sharing a bed and then falling in love with another young woman . They lived there for two winters in what became a six @-@ year relationship . She recalled , " It was cold , isolated , romantic and so intense — quite special . " In 1995 , Waters was at Queen Mary and Westfield College writing her PhD dissertation on gay and lesbian historical fiction from 1870 onward when she became interested in the Victorian era . While learning about the activism in socialism , women 's suffrage , and utopianism of the period , she was inspired to write a work of fiction of the kind that she would like to read . Specifically , Waters intended to write a story that focused on an urban setting , diverging from previous lesbian @-@ themed books such as Isabel Miller 's Patience and Sarah , in which two women escape an oppressive home life to live together freely in the woods . She said to herself at the time , " there 's so much more to lesbian history than that " . 
