I suspect only a poet would be equal to it. Though Daneman doggedly hauls aspects of them into view and pontificates upon them, her sensibilities, thinking, and writing style are insufficiently sophisticated for the task of making Fonteyn live on paper. The artistry, however, and even the personality as a whole never get illuminated. Meredith Daneman, with her own extensive background in ballet, tells Fonteyn’s story in vivid prose with insight and sensitivity. This includes an exhaustive list of her lovers and testaments to her sexual avidity, piquantly at odds with the sublime purity she embodied onstage. She ended it on the 21st of February, 1991, as Prima Ballerina Assoluta, Dame of the British Empire and the most legendary dancer since Pavlova. True to current taste, Daneman aims for a portrait of the artist as a flesh-and-blood woman.
Accordingly, the dancer and novelist Meredith Daneman allows herself nearly 600 pages to tackle the subject of Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991), that beloved icon of classical dancing, the epitome of the exquisitely refined English style, and-hand in hand with Frederick Ashton, for whom she served as muse-a linchpin in the development of British ballet. Few books capture the insecurity and relentless self-flagellation of the dancer’s psyche, but Meredith Daneman writes of it with painful and occasionally jubilant relish.
The fashion in biography today calls for exorbitant length and the revelation-in the interests of truth, shock value, or both-of what used to be called a person’s private life. Meredith Danemans career included dance, modelling and writing. Meredith Daneman, a novelist and former dancer, reveals the story of Peggy Hookham, a little girl from suburban England, who grew up to become a Dame of the. Fonteyn: Avid flesh-and-blood woman photo: Penguin Putnam Inc.
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