Fingersmith

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 3, Chapters 14-17

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Susan Trinder, usually called Sue, narrates her story. She is an orphan living under the care of Mrs. Sucksby, who takes in abandoned infants, and Mr. Ibbs, who runs a locksmith shop next door. London, in the 1860s, is a vast and tumultuous place. Sue relates the “first time I remember thinking about the world and my place in it” (3). She is taken to see the theatrical version of Oliver Twist, becoming frightened when the villainous Bill Sykes strikes Nancy. Her cries cause her caretaker, Flora, to usher her out of the play and back to Mrs. Sucksby, who scolds the young girl for taking the impressionable Sue to the theater. Mrs. Sucksby also interrogates Flora about “your little rig” (4). It turns out that Mrs. Sucksby and Mr. Ibbs oversee a band of young thieves (fingersmiths) who pickpocket and lift “poke”—ill-gotten gains—at every opportunity: “We were all more or less thieves, at Lant Street” (7). Sue happens to be Mrs. Sucksby’s favorite because she is a sensitive and imaginative young girl of 17. Sue’s mother was hanged for murder after a robbery gone wrong, and it seems Mrs. Sucksby cannot bear to part with the girl—that is, until Gentleman comes along with a plan to make their fortunes.

Gentleman, whose real name may (or may not) be Richard Rivers, shows up unannounced at Christmastime to share his plan with Mrs. Sucksby and the crew. He has met an unmarried young woman, another orphan under the care of a strict and scholarly uncle, who will come into a fortune when she weds. Gentleman, of course, will woo her, wed her, and then have her placed in a psychiatric hospital after taking her inheritance. He needs Sue to help him bring his plan to fruition. The girl, Maud Lilly, is shy and innocent—and in need of a maid—so Sue will work to convince her that she should run away with Gentleman, leaving her protective uncle behind. Sue will get 2,000 pounds for her troubles—she barters it up to three—which is truly a fortune for a young, uneducated woman. Sue agrees to the deal, and Mrs. Sucksby encourages her to go, though Sue seems to rue the decision in the hindsight of her narrative.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Before Gentleman and Sue leave for Briar, the house of Christopher Lilly, Maud’s uncle, the group “must begin at once to teach me how a proper lady’s maid should be” (31). Thus, they teach Sue to fix her hair in a demure style, rather than the hard curls favored by fashionable, if lower class, women in London. She learns how to dress a lady, how to iron her clothes properly, and how to curtsy. She also has to memorize her fabricated backstory—her mistress was going to Australia after the mother’s death—and practice her character as an upstanding young woman. While the household celebrates their future good fortune, Sue broods; she has some misgivings about deceiving Maud Lilly, who Gentleman has portrayed as such an innocent that she is almost “simple-minded.” Nevertheless, Sue endures the difficult journey. She is to make her—and her benefactor, Mrs. Sucksby’s—fortune in this scheme.

The house looms large in the dark when Sue finally arrives, and she is shown to her room by the housekeeper, Mrs. Stiles. Sue notes, “I had never had a room of my own before” (55). It is connected to Maud’s room via a nearly hidden door. Sue listens at the door, anxious to hear her new mistress breathing, but hears nothing but “the creeping of a worm or a beetle in the wood” (57). She leaves her candle burning through the night, sick at heart for home.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Sue takes in her new lodgings the next day, observing that, as Gentleman had said, the place was not worth robbing; it was old and worn, with shabby furnishings. The servants drink beer with all of their meals, and Sue does not quite fit in. She is finally introduced to Maud Lilly, who she initially assesses as “commonplace” (60). Maud tells Sue about her uncle’s impressive library and scholarly work; Sue admits she cannot read, at least not very well. Maud is astonished but somewhat envious: Her uncle forces Maud to read regularly to him and his visitors. Maud feels stifled by the books and endless scholarly pursuits—not to mention the uncle’s overly protective nature. She always wears gloves, at her uncle’s insistence.

The routine of the house moves like clockwork. After dressing Maud and eating breakfast, Sue is on her own to tidy up—or do nothing—until Maud finishes her work with her uncle at one o’clock. In the afternoons, the two walk over to the red chapel and visit Maud’s mother’s grave. At night, Sue spies Maud taking out an old miniature photograph from a locked box, kissing it, and sighing over it. She assumes the picture is of Maud’s mother. Sue also observes that Maud suffers from terrible nightmares, so Sue starts to sleep in the bed with her.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Gentleman finally sends a letter that he will soon be at Briar, contracted by Mr. Lilly to help him mount his collection of paintings and drawings. This changes the dynamic between Maud and Sue, as Sue’s focus shifts from taking care of Maud to taking advantage of her innocence. This wears on her conscience, as in their time together, Sue “knew all that she liked and hated” (84). Sue can tell that Maud is in awe of Gentleman, but whether this is love or not, she cannot be sure.

Before Gentleman arrives, Sue tells Maud’s fortune with playing cards, claiming her grandmother was a “gypsy-princess” (90). Sue makes it appear as if Maud’s future with Gentleman is in the cards, as it were, but Maud is bothered by Sue’s predictions. Maud asks Sue to help her get ready for Gentleman’s visit, and she insists that Sue trade her plain, brown dress for one of Maud’s pretty velvet ones. After Gentleman—Sue must now call him Mr. Rivers—expresses his delight in seeing Maud again, Sue thinks, contrary to her initial assessment, that Maud “was handsome, she was very fair and slight” (97). Not only is Maud pleased to see him, but the servants are also positively enchanted by his return.

Gentleman works on Mr. Lilly’s collection in the mornings, and he gives painting lessons to a hapless Maud in the afternoons. This allows him to pursue her without suspicion, with Sue as a chaperone, watching the two intently for signs of Maud’s growing attachment. When she and Gentleman finally steal a moment to speak of their plan in secret, Sue assures Gentleman that Maud has been amply prepared to receive his overtures. Gentleman tells Sue that “Mrs Sucksby has five pounds on your success” (105). All of their efforts come to fruition when Maud finally allows Gentleman to kiss her, after which a dark storm drives them all back into the house.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

The next morning, Maud refuses to eat her breakfast. She does not act like a young woman in love. Instead, she broods on her mother, who died in childbirth, and agonizes over Gentleman’s proposal—for he has, indeed, asked Maud to marry him. They would leave her uncle’s house under cover of darkness and be married in secret; otherwise, Mr. Lilly would certainly not allow Maud her liberty. Maud seems unconcerned with her uncle’s reaction to this plan, should she agree to it, but her own happiness appears elusive. She admits to Sue that she does not know if she really loves Gentleman. In fact, Sue intuits that “[s]he didn’t love him at all. She was afraid of him” (115). While Sue feels guilty, she still persuades Maud that marriage is in her best interest, that Gentleman would surely perish without her. Three thousand pounds is too much to relinquish, even for her newfound friend’s sake. Still, when Gentleman proposes to violate Maud—with Sue’s assistance—before they are even married, Sue balks.

Once all of the arrangements have been made, relations between Sue and Gentleman become tense. Sue’s impulse to protect Maud does not sit well with Gentleman, and he threatens to cut her out of the deal if she does not play along. He argues that nobody would believe Sue’s version of events should Gentleman—with his faux fancy dress and masculine superiority—contradict her. Sue backs down, thinking of what she owes to Mrs. Sucksby, though her guilty conscience is unassuaged. Still, she manages to keep Gentleman from sneaking into Maud’s room at Briar.

For her part, Maud becomes increasingly nervous about her impending elopement, and she asks Sue what to expect on her wedding night. Sue tries to explain, but words fail her, so Sue kisses her. They make love, and the next morning, Sue is overwhelmed by what they have done—Maud herself says it was only a dream—but she is still thinking about the money. Miserably, she stays away from Maud’s bed after that because “I couldn’t have kissed her, without wanting to save her” (133).

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

At long last, Gentleman’s contract is over, and he leaves Briar. Sue and Maud are to wait three weeks, then leave after the household is asleep, meeting him at the riverbanks where a parson and an inn will be waiting. On the day of their departure, Sue readies everything while Maud nervously goes about her daily routine. However, when Gentleman arrives in the boat, Maud seems stoic and steady. When they arrive at the designated location, Gentleman tells the parson they are to be married immediately. A small scramble to procure some flowers for Maud and Sue ensues, then a few short vows are spoken, and the deed is done.

Gentleman sends Sue into the marital bedroom to ready Maud for the night. Maud kisses her and tries to initiate a sexual encounter, but Sue refuses, leaving Maud at Gentleman’s disposal. The next morning, and for the following few weeks, Maud is despondent: She barely eats; she refuses to wash her hair; she wears the same dress, sullied by the journey, and gives Sue her finer gowns. Finally, Gentleman summons the doctors from the psychiatric hospital to examine her, telling Maud they are only artist friends of his from London. They question Mrs. Cream, the innkeeper, and Sue, too, about Maud’s behavior. They decide to admit her to the psychiatric hospital the following day.

The carriage comes to take them away, Maud still in her stained gown while Sue is dressed in Maud’s velvet finery. When they reach the psychiatric hospital, the doctor’s hand is offered not to Maud but Sue. Sue has been tricked, with Gentleman telling the doctors that she was his wife and pretending to be the maid. It is easy for the doctors to believe because Sue has grown plump from eating all of the food that Maud has refused, and she is dressed as the mistress, not the maid. As Sue must inevitably conclude, Maud “had been in on it from the start” (161).

Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis

The novel pays homage to one of its most significant influences, the work of Charles Dickens. When the reader first meets Susan Trinder, later Sue Smith, it is via her experience at a staged version of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The reader is meant to notice the resonances: Like Oliver, Sue is an orphan in Mrs. Sucksby’s house, surrounded by abandoned infants. She, too, is the hapless innocent in a gang of thieves, swindled by a Bill Sykes-type character. When Gentleman first arrives at Mrs. Sucksby’s place—at Christmastime, no less—his presence is heard before it is seen: “Like the knocking on a door in a play, when the dead man’s ghost comes back” (16). This is reminiscent of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol when Marley’s ghost disturbs Scrooge’s sleep and his reckoning with his past commences. The author also gives her characters names that reflect their roles or personalities. For example, Mrs. Sucksby is a degraded maternal figure, suckling all of her infants—including Sue—for a price. Mrs. Cakebread is the cook at Briar, and Maud Lilly is a flower of innocence—until the reader discovers differently. The place in which these raucous band of thieves reside is in a back alley near the Thames, “that crooked way” (10). The physical surroundings reflect the characters’ moral qualities (or lack thereof), a typical Dickensian trope.

Sue herself is rendered a mere object, part of the spoils—the “poke”—of the trade in thievery. When Sue discusses the vast number of objects that come in and out of the house, she includes herself among those ill-gotten gains: “There was only one thing, in fact, that had come and got stuck—one thing that had somehow withstood the tremendous pull of that passage of poke—one thing that Mr Ibbs and Mrs Sucksby seemed never to think to put a price to” (10). That “thing,” of course, is Sue herself, left there by her mother whose story—if Mrs. Sucksby is to be believed—is both inspiring and tragic, as a legendary thief who met her demise at the end of a rope. Sue believes herself an object of value to Mrs. Sucksby: “She let me sleep beside her, in her own bed. She shined my hair with vinegar. You treat jewels like that” (12). Alas, she does not consider the fortune that a jewel can reel in when the trade is right.

The thieves, Gentleman included, have little compunction for the immoral nature of their business. Money, after all, has always been amassed by immoral means. Gentleman scoffs at the inherent wickedness of his plan to besmirch young Maud, take her money, and place her in a psychiatric hospital:

‘Wicked? [...]. [O]f course it’s wicked! But it’s wicked to the tune of fifteen thousand pounds—and oh! but that’s a sweet tune, hum it how you will. Then again, do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don’t think it! Money never is’ (28).

He fancies them to be modern-day Robin Hoods—except that the money is redistributed only to him and his cohorts.

Still, there is something noble about the life these characters lead, given their options in late-19th-century London. Sue herself recognizes this: “Say what you like about the kind of life I was used to, it was a life without masters” (35). Teaching her to behave like a servant does not come easily, and when Sue first arrives at Briar, she is disdainful of the hypocrisy she witnesses: “That’s like a servant. A servant says, ‘All for my master,’ and means, ‘All for myself.’ It’s the two-facedness of it that I can’t bear” (83). The servants skim items from the household to sell or trade for their own financial benefit while pretending to be loyal. As far as Sue is concerned, her thievery—at least up until her dealings with Maud Lilly—has been honest. She grows to love Maud slowly, and her misgivings about her role in deceiving her grow along with her feelings.

At first, she is dressed in “a plain brown dress,” much to her disappointment; however, as Gentleman sees it, “it was the perfect dress for a sneak or for a servant—and so all the more perfect for me, who was going to Briar to be both” (35). By the time she realizes she has been betrayed, she is wearing a silken dress of Maud’s: “She [Maud] wore the old gown still, that was stained with mud, and I wore the handsome silk one” (157). From the beginning, the distinct roles of mistress and maid are conflated, interdependent, and blurred: “And if she didn’t need a maid, she shouldn’t know she was a lady” (33), as Gentleman teases. The implication is that a mistress must have a maid, or else she cannot possibly be a mistress; the roles are co-dependent, in a literal sense. Maud’s compulsion to constantly compare the two makes them mirror images of one another. She puts their heads together to compare their hair color; she remarks that Sue’s feet are “almost as neat” (77) as hers. When she invites Sue into her bed, Sue considers them sisters and assumes it might be a customary arrangement: “For all I knew, it might have been an ordinary thing, for a mistress and her maid to double up like girls” (82). This doubling increases when Maud starts dressing Sue in her clothes—eventually, there is a nefarious purpose for this—and she undresses Sue to swap the brown dress for orange velvet: “Now I am your maid,” she exclaims, “and you are the mistress!” (93). This all serves to foreshadow the treachery that is to come.

There is immense irony in the flowers gathered before the hasty marriage ceremony. Not only is the plant’s very name “honesty,” but the bouquet that is gathered also appears poorly, “a sprig of dry leaves, round as shillings, white as paper, quivering on a few thin stalks that looked ready to snap” (143). The mention of shillings—monetary units—underscores why this “honesty” fares so sickly, too fragile not to “snap.” Sue’s passionate murmurings to Maud during their coupling—“you pearl, you pearl” (131)—also function to objectify Maud as an item of monetary value, just as Sue had earlier considered herself a “jewel” to Mrs. Sucksby. This, in turn, becomes ironic when the gravity of Maud’s betrayal is finally felt: Sue notes that Maud’s “gaze was hard. Hard as marble, hard as brass. Hard as a pearl, and the grit that lies inside it” (160). Maud is, indeed, a pearl, the product of corruption inside an innocent-looking shell.

Sue herself is the proverbial sacrificial lamb, as the supper before her journey to Briar symbolizes. The household celebrates their potential good fortune with a pig’s head, and Sue watches as Mr. Ibbs sharpen the carving knife:

He leaned with his hand on the door-post, and I watched him do it with a queer sensation at the roots of my hair: for all up the post were cuts from where, each Christmas Day when I was a girl, he had laid the knife upon my head to see how high I’d grown. Now he drew the blade back and forth across the stone (39).

In this case, Sue truly becomes the “poke,” to be carved up and parceled out among the beneficiaries of Gentleman’s scheme.

Not only is the novel Dickensian, but it is also Dickensian in the most Gothic manner possible: A distressed maiden (Maud) is imprisoned in an old and crumbling house, held captive by a cruel and elusive master, where hidden peepholes and secret rooms abound as schemes and misunderstandings proliferate. When Sue puts her ear to the door leading into Maud’s room, all she can hear is “the creeping of a worm or a beetle in the wood” (57). The house’s very walls are invaded, corrupted, and subject to slow decay. The “grim” house is covered in ivy and moss, smothered by “a dead kind of creeper,” with a door so swollen by rain that only one half of it opens (72). The physical state of the house mirrors the moral condition of its inhabitants, steadily descending into dissolution.