SOURCE: A review of Secret Muses, in Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1997, p. 524.

[The following short review points out the strengths of Kavanagh's portrait of Frederick Ashton's life.]

A slavishly detailed but lightsomely written life of the British ballet-maker.

Kavanagh, London editor of the New Yorker, explains in an afterword that Ashton alternately authorized and forbade her project, chagrined to be reminded by her of his mortality. "It's the finality of it—knowing you're grabbing as much out of me as you can before I die," he once complained. And she has grabbed it. The intelligence and novelistic command of this book about the man who helped to invent modern English ballet is equaled only by the depth of Kavanagh's research. Her enviable ease and glamorous settings range from Ashton's first glimpse, as a boy in Lima, Peru, of Anna Pavlova, to his apprenticeship with Bronislava Nijinska in Paris in...