Ballet Genius (U)

by Gillian Freeman, Thorpe Freeman

Intimate portraits of some of the twentieth century's greatest dancers features personal vignettes and anecdotes about Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nureyev, Alicia Markova, and Lynn Seymour, among others

543 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Born in London, daughter of Dr. Jack Freeman and his wife, she graduated in English Language and Literature from the University of Reading in 1951. She married Edward Thorpe, novelist and ballet critic of the Evening Standard, in 1955. They have two daughters. One of her best known books was the 1961 novel The Leather Boys (published under the pseudonym Eliot George, a reference to the writer George Eliot), a story of a gay relationship between two young working-class men, later turned into a film for which she wrote the screenplay, this time under her own name. The novel was commissioned by the publisher Anthony Blond, who wanted a story about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs". Her non-fiction book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), was a pioneering study of pornography. In 1979, on another commission from Blond, she wrote a fictional diary, Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938–48; Freeman's authorship was not at first revealed and many readers took it to be genuine. Her most recent book is But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), a fictional study of the Bloomsbury Group.