Category: Dancing in Fiction
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A Christmas Eve Dance
People of other languages must have their own memories of famous literary Christmas parties. This, I believe, is the most famous in the English-speaking world. It was envisioned by the English novelist Charles Dickens in 1843 and thus is probably set c. 1800, when Ebeneezer Scrooge, the hero of A Christmas Carol, was apprentice-aged: The…
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Burning floors
Dancing was so much a part of Catholic social life in the 20th century West, and forbidding dancing so much associated with Anabaptist sects, that it came as a surprise to me to discover that there had existed, throughout the history of the Church, a number of Catholic pastors who objected to the practice. It…
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A Delicious Redowa
Among the many online remarks I have read on the subject of social dancing is the observation that some girls grow up thinking that dances will be like those they see in Disney cartoons: beautiful ballgowns, waltzing, an enchanted teapot singing “Tale As Old As Time”… The reality of the standard middle school dance is…
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A Period Piece
Having decided to read more fiction about dancing, I purchased Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz (1932, republished by Virago, 1981). It is an interesting rather than enjoyable book; there is an atmosphere of sexual threat throughout, and 1932 is not nostalgic for 1920. There is an unspoken message that bringing up teenage girls as…
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Strip the Willow for Soldiers
There are dances traditionally for women, dances traditionally for men, and dances traditionally danced by both sexes together. Then there is Scottish Highland dancing. “Friday night was always dancing night,” begins George MacDonald Fraser’s unforgettable story “The General Danced at Dawn.” After a long preamble about dancing, the narrator unfolds the story of the inspection…