("Tipping the Velvet")

I grew somewhat bored with Nan, the central character right before part three of the book. This is perhaps my first lesbian romance book, but romance is romance after all. Wish Sarah Waters had written more about life on a Victorian stage.

• Sometimes, I believe I can catch the scent of liquor and brine beneath my thumb-nail.
• Since we all passed our days in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish.
• I said it rather firmly, as if going to the Palace every night was some chore I had been set to do.
• She sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed
• .. holding my fingers an inch away from (her possessions) as if they had an aura, as well as a surface, that might be stroked.
• the delicate, diminutive sounds of good oyster-supper: the creak of hinges, the slap of discarded beards, the trickle of liquor and butter and beer.
• (The seaside) was all as familiar to me as the lines on my own face, and - like one's face when viewed in a glass - both fascinating and rather dull.
• 'Variety, which age cannot wither, nor custom stale.'
• It turned out that he had a one-armed juggler for a client.
• the ancient seams gave a far of dust and hair /great dark jagged bulk of the House of Parliament
• I.. stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge
• I .. thought She loves me, She loves me - like a fool with a daisy-stalk, endlessly exclaiming over the same last browning petal.
• Here I was, a boy - a boy with buttons and a belt. The thought, once again, was a saucy one; I felt I ought not to encourage it.
• After that - clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl - my entry into the profession was rather rapid.
• Like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.
• To walk as a boy, as a handsome boy in a well-sewn suit.. it had a brittle kind of glamour of it.
• The aristocracy or leading men of this particular branch of the (renters) were the guardsmen.
• 'What colour today, Grace?' .. Gracie's way was quite as valid a philosophy, I thought, as many others.
• my curious gaslit career
• It was just as if the city were a monstrous carpet to which a giant hand had applied the beater, to make all glow again.
• .. for all that an unlikely Pandora, with my scarlet jacket and my saucy cap, my crop and my bare bare bum.