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“... About​ clothes, it’s awful,’ the protagonist thinks in Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934). Everything makes you want pretty clothes like hell. People laugh at girls who are badly dressed … And the shop-windows sneering and smiling in your face. And then you look at the skirt of your costume, all crumpled at the back. And your hideous underclothes ...”

“... For​ almost thirty years, I have stored in my small New York apartment clothes that belonged to my grandmother. An unlined shirt-jacket of raw silk, brilliant green, that she sewed in the 1960s or 1970s, and that still holds something of the way she held herself. Three of her coats: a two-colour bouclé with a delicate ivory silk lining; the others black and more practical ...”

“... A small boy​ , four years old, ‘parading around’ in his sister’s ‘prettiest dress’, blissfully happy, until: ‘My mother beat the hell out of me, and threatened every bone in my uninhibited body if I wore girls’ clothes again.’ He wept, but did not fail to note where his tears fell: ‘all over the pink organdy full-skirted dress ...”

“... is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss,’ Lisa Cohen observes in All We Know, and, contrariwise, ‘a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.’ Why do we see what we see? Why do we fail to see what others see? Can we see things before they are ready to be seen? Can ...”

“... trying to get back to the family château in Baden from the seaside resort where, presumably, Lisa had been meeting up with one of her many lovers.At one point we were marched out of the train at Schwerin … and corralled in the lounge of a hotel on the main square, and here the sailors with their banners and slogans were mutinying all right … There ...”