title: The Mating Dance
author: Randall, Rona
description: Two sisters are rivals os stage, and when the curtain falls... enemies in love.
  
  Alive with the color and drama of the theatre in late-Victorian London, this is the story of two aspiring actresses and their lifelong rivalry in art and love. Lucinda Grainger, born out of wedlock to the leading lady's dresser at London's Boswell Theatre, dreams of a stage debut that will compensate for the years of insults she has endured - slights delivered with malice and an exquisite sense of timing by Clementine Boswell, the self-indulgent daughter of the theatre's aristocratic director. Clementine is Lucinda's diametric opposite: brunette where Lucinda is blonde, amoral and devious where Lucinda is trusting and artless, ruthless where Lucinda is compassionate. All they share is their passion for the stage and their fatal attractions to the wrong men. In their duel of wit and will, the prize is the Boswell Theatre itself, and each woman competes in her own way.