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Isadora Duncan

My Life Paperback – March 17, 1996

by Isadora Duncan (Author)

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My Life
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Unquestionably brave, creative, and erudite, the free spirit Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) captivated the American, European, and Soviet cultural scenes with her innovative modern dance and un-self-conscious lifestyle.

My Life, the classic autobiography first published just after Duncan's death, is a frank and engrossing life account of this remarkable visionary and feminist who took on the world, reinvented dance, and led the way for future great American modernists Ruth St. Denis, Agnes de Mille, and Martha Graham.Documenting Duncan's own life as a dancer and as a woman―from her enchantment with classical music and poetry as a child in San Francisco and her intense study of classical Greek art in Athens, through the great strides she made in teaching, founding schools, performing, and collaborating with international artists, to her notorious love affairs and the tragic deaths of her own children―My Life reissued here is still as extraordinary as the woman who wrote it more than sixty years ago.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Liveright
Publication date

March 17, 1996
Dimensions

5.6 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10

0871401584
ISBN-13

978-0871401588
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Isadora Duncan
51
Paperback
61 offers from $5.96

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fabulous is the only adjective that comes close to doing justice to Isadora Duncan (1878-1927). Her awesomely self-assured autobiography depicts a woman who while still in her teens tells an eminent theatrical manager (from whom she desperately needs a job), "I have discovered the art that has been lost for two thousand years.... I bring you the dance." In Duncan's rendering of her life, composers fling themselves at the piano and compose new music for her on the spot. Men pine for her love (the book's sexual frankness, while hardly startling today, was considered quite scandalous in 1927). And the poor mortals who can never understand her need to be free can at least applaud wildly at her concerts. Duncan and her siblings sleep in a bare Parisian attic, then dance barefoot through the Luxembourg Gardens. They travel to Greece to worship "in the Sacred Land of Hellas," where they build their very own temple. Duncan is capable of seeing the humor in her rhapsodic immersion in art, but we don't really want her to be realistic and self-deprecating like ordinary mortals. It's her divine passion, her supreme confidence in her own genius that make My Life such fun to read. --Wendy Smith

Review

"Fascinating, even sensational reading."
― New York Times

"Isadora was a wild voluptuary, a true revolutionary. She flouted every tradition. . . . She alone and unhelped changed the direction of her entire art."
― Agnes de Mille

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Liveright; Reissue edition (March 17, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0871401584
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0871401588
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,733,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #895 in Dancer Biographies
- #5,780 in Artist & Architect Biographies
- #20,562 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

Customer Reviews:
23 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		61%
4 star		12%
3 star		12%
2 star		7%
1 star		8%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Marian

A great autobiography

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2014

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Great reading and especially for writer's, dancers, creative artists, and anyone who can appreciate an original thinker. She is so original and so deep in her views and understanding of so much of life and personal expression that she is more than what she is commonly credited or recognized as (an innovative dancer that completely changed the future of dance in her time) She is an artist and brilliant woman in many ways including being way ahead of her times in her artistic expression and appreciation of art but also very much in regards to so many issues, political, spiritual, and human rights/relations/interactions, and more. this is a thoroughly enriching book to read even for those who may not have considered it so.

2 people found this helpful

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Fleur de Lys

An unsatisfying ending

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2010

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I got to discover Isadora Duncan while reading a french novel that mentioned the dancer. I googled her and was swept away but the information I got from a Wikipedia page and immediately decided to purchase the book. It was a good suprise. Isadora was multilingual - difficult to say which major European language she couldn't speak. At a time when travel was long and limited, she can be described as a very traveled lady and my wasn't she cultured! Everyday, she danced herself to sleep even while traveling. However she was finacially irresponsible and I got the impression that she imposed her expenses on her lovers and wealthy fans and aristocrats. She endured a painful loss, twice, when her children died, the only dark period in her life as she was always full of joy and rhythm. I was hoping that the last pages of the book would contain her marriage, yes, marriage, an act she always swore never to be part of yet got married to Sergei Yesenin, a Russian poet. Why was that part omitted? Also,her in stay Nice in southern France where she accidentally died was never mentioned, just words she supposedly spoke out the day she died. Of course she didn't commit suicide so I wasn't expecting an "Adieu" letter from her but surely, I felt cheated after having read so many pages only to come to an abrupt and rushed ending. What a shame! I recommend reading other sources (web and books) about Isadora before reading this book if you really want to know who she really was.

One person found this helpful

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AZURETIME

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2015

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Thank You!

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2014

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Loved the autobiography, was disappointed it stopped just as she was about to open the school in Moscow though. Thanks!

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Yngwie

It's always rewarding to read about the story of a ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2015

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It's always rewarding to read about the story of a free woman...the book is NOT a masterpiece but it's ok

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2015

I knew nothing about Isadora Duncan, the highly creative dancer, before I picked up a copy of her charming autobiography. It is only because I had recently discovered that she had spent some time in Albania, a country that fascinates me and about which I have written, that I decided to read this book.

The book was highly enjoyable. She writes well and makes frequent allusions to, and uses quotes from, the great classical authors and also from Nietzche and other more recent writers. I felt that Isadora was trying in her flamboyant way to give a reasonably accurate account of her colourful life. It was a life of tragedy and triumph, liberally spiced with a series of lovers who never failed to help her with her career and her life problems, including the sad loss of her three children. She was privileged to have met and been admired by great personalities such as Stanislavsky, Rodin, d'Annunzio, and Eleanora Duse. She married the Russian poet Essenin briefly, but that part of her life is not recorded in her book.

As for Albania, there are only a few pages dedicated to her brief time there. Frustratingly, her autobiography ends with the invitation she received to set up a dance school in the young Soviet Union in about 1921.

The autobiography has gripped me sufficiently to make me want to read a good biography of Isadora.

Review by author of "From Albania to Sicily"

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2000

An autobiography is a way of looking inside a person's mind. We have no real right to expect objectivity or "the long view" on any given subject.
Isadora Duncan's autobiography is a terrific example of the above. She was a hugely talented, flamboyant individual who chose to march to her own drummer from an early age. She is passionate in her descriptions of her inner life, her career and her lovers and changed the whole concept of "The Dance", breaking away from ballet (which she considered ugly and contrived) and inventing what we'd call "modern dance".
She was a fantastic dancer, but as a writer she is far too interested in her own inner world. The people around her float by as a succesion of badly defined cardboard cutouts, and one visited city sounds much like any other. After a while this DOES get rather boring. The lack of dates (such as "that was in 1925" or whatever) or a neatly defined chapter structure means that it's pretty hard to keep track of the passage of time. In the end, reading this book becomes a bit of a struggle: it's like being stuck in a someone's rather boring dreamworld.
Her sollipsism is (at times) a bit of a hoot and her inability to perceive the world for what it is provide the reader with occasional bits of unintentional black comedy.
An example: after deciding that ancient Greece was the mother of all art, Isadora sunk a great deal of her money in trying to rebuild a Greek temple. Her family spoke no Greek but lived for months amid the ruins, performing dances and wearing togas while getting cheated by the local villagers. She also formed a chorus of Greek urchins to perform ancient music and was later disappointed when during a tour, the urchins begin growing up and staying out late and coming home drunk.
A more human writer would have managed a bit of irony, a touch of sympathy for these common, simple people caught up in the mad American artist's vision, but Isadora never quite manages it. Sadly, it is precisely this sort of self-centered and humourless viewpoint that makes this book so stodgy.
On the positive side, however, one DOES get a really good idea of what Isadora Duncan was like and how she saw her art and one can't really ask for more from an autobiography.

14 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

d herceg-lockhart

What a life story!!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 16, 2018

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Some people cram twenty lives into one, and Isadora Duncan was certainly one of them. What an extraordinary soul she was, what a journey she had. Thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring!

Elizabeth Hadley

I find what I’m looking for.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2019

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It was in perfect condition,

Cristiana

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 17, 2015

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book in perfect condition

Sergiu Pobereznic (author)

I would like to state that the world is indebted and grateful ...

Reviewed in Australia on September 13, 2015

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I know that I am probably going to commit Isadora Duncan sacrilege with this review, so before I begin, and for the record, I would like to state that the world is indebted and grateful for what Isadora Duncan achieved in her lifetime and what she stands for as an artist in the dance world.

However, my critique is directed towards her writing (and perhaps her eccentric career claims) not her dance and career achievements.

Although her fame is undoubtedly recognized throughout the world, my inner voice tells me that she was a serial confabulist from what I have just read. I feel absolutely terrible for admitting this about her memoire. Perhaps it was the peculiar writing style that made the work seem so categorically unrealistic.

The opening of the book was, I admit, entertaining and even a touch humorous. About her birth she says: “Before I was born my mother was in a great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne.” Then she goes on to say that this is why she began to dance. "It was the result of oysters and champagne – the food of Aphrodite."
This is basically the tone of her memoire.

She shared some interesting and abstruse philosophies with unique and idiosyncratic thoughts on artistic and life related issues, like only Isadora Duncan could. About art she said: “… that is not the thing itself, but a symbol – a conception of the ideal of life.” This is something I agreed with, wholeheartedly. But as the book progressed the author ventured briskly into a mythical, chimerical land full of fantastical allegories and symbolism that rendered me speechless – until I wrote this review that is.

She spoke of herself as a legend in her own time and saw herself as “built along the lines of the Venus de Milo”. Not at all vainglorious. Her life reads as though it were a fictional account. She moved through the world like a nymph. I had to double check that it was in fact her autobiography that I was reading.

There were times I wondered if I were reading some fictional, anachronistic, olde-worlde Dickensian style melodrama with a martyred, often penurious and severely misunderstood heroin at the helm of a dancing career that was always on the precipitous edge of celebrity.
Isadora was The Little Match-girl meets Ondine (on dry land) in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and perhaps the Odyssey with profound Wagnerian musical motifs. She seemed completely out of touch with the real world. Her life has the feel and atmosphere of an epic Homeric poem that unfolds in masses of drama and ends in the only way it can… TRAGEDY.

When discussing spirituality and her soul she said: “My soul is like a battlefield where Apollo, Dionosyus, Christ, Nietzsche and Richard Wagner dispute the ground. ”

A good writer she certainly WAS NOT – favoring a syrupy, flowery kind of prose – but at least she never claims to be a literary genius, unlike her dancing. Quite the opposite, she tells the reader over and over that she is not good as a writer. But what she does manage to do is harp on about all her dancing talents without lassitude. It seems that she was always showered and covered in flowers. This became tiresome. Lauding your own plaudits is not an attractive quality to behold. Her writing style made her heroic, larger-than-life journey of movement, dance and freedom of expression into a comical pantomime.

Let’s not forget that she had no previous training as a dancer and taught dance from the age of ten, with great success. Seriously? When asked who taught her to dance, she answered: “Terpsichore.” She was living in a parallel universe, surely.

She comes across (because she probably is) so immodest, self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing that it made reading quite a laborious and punishing task. I suppose this is all right because she was, after all, the improvisational, modern dancing Pop-star of her generation. She invented what is known as ‘free movement’. She can be forgiven for anything after such an accomplishment. If only she had held back a little (or perhaps a lot) in the rhapsodizing of her career accomplishments.

The most humorous aspect of this memoire is that even though she claims to have often been impecuniously poor, she was still able to act like a complete and utter supercilious snob when she was down on her luck and apparently sleeping on park benches in central London. She never seems to speak about those times with understanding.

Many people have said that she wasn’t given enough credit for what she accomplished. The fact is this; the world knows the name Isadora Duncan, surely this is mission accomplished. Even so, not to worry, she gave herself enough credit in this memoire.

She was most certainly composed of a hefty amount of self-assured aplomb and a steely demeanor. Even if only 10% of her story is genuine, I take my hat off to her. She had hubris and conquered the impossible dream in a time when the task would have been near impossible. Very few females were heard in those days.
I think that she would have been an enchanting feminist with extremely radical ideas during a time when such a person was beyond rare – a zealot of the dance world. Oh, and a vegetarian to boot. She did it all on carrots.

But, to me, best of all is the manner in which she died. Uber theatrical. A dramaturge could not have improved on this, even with limitless funding, writers, producers and designers to create the setting. Isadora Duncan was strangled by a long scarf that became entangled in the wheel of her car.

Obviously I don’t celebrate her death, but it happened in the most cinematic way possible. Even if she had planned her death it could not have occurred in a more memorable way. Her life was meant to be captured in a movie, or a great novel, but the screenplay should not to be written by the heroine herself.

The tale itself made sudden leaps during the story telling. Whenever this happened I was left wondering what she may have omitted from her amazing, poetic, and passionate (Shakespearian/Homeric inspired) life.

Early on she mentions that:
“The thing that makes for a secure and calm existence is ‘good English servants’. They move about with a sort of assured aristocratic manner and have no wish to rise to the social scale of their employers.”
Interesting view that tells you just a little more about her modest character.

She often uses long phrases and paragraphs in French, German and Hungarian. This is acceptable if you speak the languages but quite alienating otherwise. How many people speak Hungarian? other than the Hungarians. I have said this before; publishers should revise such things and give a translation for the readers. It’s not that difficult to do.

I wanted to like this book, sadly it wasn’t to be so. Perhaps it was all a metaphor for something that I was being too obtuse to comprehend. If you can get past the phantasmagorical sections, you may just find something inspirational.
– Sergiu Pobereznic – (author)

Swathy Ullas

very bad response from Amazon

Reviewed in India on May 20, 2018

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I ordered it did the payment...but there is no messages or information abt delivery of the item from the time I booked...no reply from helpline number too...very bad response from Amazon...

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