and they are like nothing—they're like dust. Then she walks on the stage and—she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet... She makes me want to smile and weep, at once... I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her. Donna Allegra and Christina Patterson in The Observer also praise Nan as a passionate and captivating character. Patterson and Mel Steel in The Independent compare her resourcefulness to that of Moll Flanders. Of her three Victorian-set novels, Waters uses humour and "an attractive lightness of touch" most effectively in Tipping the Velvet, according to Paulina Palmer. Nan the narrator describes the irony of her "curious gaslit career" as a rent-boy only to end up—in Diana's words—as her "tart". Waters had such fun writing the novel that she told Robert McCrum from The Observer in 2009 that if she had no obligations to meet stemming from her subsequent success as a writer that she would continue writing Nan's story. Genre Nan's path through the plot indicates that Tipping the Velvet is part Bildungsroman, and her journeys through the streets of London invoke elements of a picaresque novel. Scholar Emily Jeremiah characterises the story as a Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age adventure but one that far surpasses a simple coming-out story. Stefania Ciocia in Literary London writes that the plot has classical elements of a fairy tale as it follows the main character's growth and progression, and has a moral ending that includes a course of events where Nan forsakes three suitors for her—in this case—Princess Charming. Nan finds true love with Florence, who is a bit dowdy, somewhat stout, certainly not wealthy, and driven to improve the world; the least likely of all the characters. A review in Publishers Weekly states that the series of events leading to Nan finding love are "unpredictable and moving". Nan's experiences eventually reveal serious faults of the society she moves through, the primary element of a picaresque novel. For this and other reasons, Waters' books are frequently compared to stories by Charles Dickens; the reader follows Nan's movement from sheltered naif to exuberant theatre performer to rent-boy to mistress to housewife then socialist orator, showing allegiance to none of these professions or ideals. Michael Upchurch in The Seattle Times writes that Nan's inability or unwillingness to adhere to any profession or