Isadora Duncan is often described as the mother of modern dance, a distinction that conjures classically-derived grandeur and elegantly floating fabric. But behind her work was a life marked by a number of tragedies: If you know anything about her, you probably know that she died in 1927 when a scarf she was wearing got caught in the wheel of a car. But you may not know that years before, both of her children drowned when the car they were in shot into the River Seine in Paris. Amelia Gray’s new novel, Isadora, lives within the tension between Duncan’s hagiography—which she often contributed to herself—and the real life it derived from.
In fictionalizing Duncan, Gray isn’t straying too far from what the dancer herself did when assembling her own story. In fact, Gray’s vision of the dancer was inspired in part by Duncan’s own autobiography, My Life, which is itself something of a fictional document. Writing in the Paris Review, Gray calls My Life a book that “has the guideposts of reality, but those guideposts are placed irregularly across a landscape of a fabulously fictionalized life.”