A frail, exotic-looking girl-so shy she barely spoke a word until age six and so sickly she needed to be home schooled-is diagnosed with flat feet and knock-knees. Her weak legs require remedial dance classes, and thus the tiny and fragile Lilian Alicia Marks is discovered as a child prodigy. Pushed into show business a tage ten, and despite a series of family tragedies and financial ruin, the fourteen-year-old is accepted as the youngest-ever soloist in Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, re-born under the Russified name Alicia Markova.George Balanchine's first ballet for the company was choreographed for Markova, with costumes personally designed for her by Henri Matisse. The imposing and mercurial Diaghilev would bond emotionally with the tiny dancer as with no one else, even considering legal adoption.This frightfully timid and obedient little girl would become the greatest classical ballerina of her time and one of the most self-reliant, entrepreneurial, and independent dancers in an era of prima donnas. For the first time,Tina Sutton utilizes all of Dame Alicia Markova's intimate journals and correspondence to paint a full picture of her astonishing rise as a poor, single Jewish woman in a time of rampant anti-Semitism and sexism. Ballet lovers and readers around the world will be fascinated by the story of one of the twentieth century's great artists.

Tina Sutton is currently a fashion, features and arts writer for The Boston Globe and has been a writer,researcher, and journalist for over thirty years. She also researches and writes material for museum and art catalogs and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.