Loie Fuller publishes her autobiography, "Fifteen Years of a Dancer's Life, with Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends." Miss Fuller was born on an Illinois farm; thence she progressed to Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Vienna, and Russia. She made her debut as an actress by speaking a "piece" at the Chicago Progressive Lyceum when she was two and a half years old. Years later when she was rehearsing in a play called "Quack, M.D.," she made use in a hypnotism scene of a wide skirt of soft transparent silk that had been sent her from India. Under the lights the gauzy material seemed first a butterfly, then an orchid under her manipulations; thus the idea of serpentine dancing came to her and a new art was born. She was engaged soon afterwards to dance in New York in "Uncle Celestins" and awoke one morning like Byron to find herself famous. In delicious, crisp style, punctuated with staccatos of remembered ecstasies, Miss Fuller relates her experiences and recounts the incidents of her friendships. These friendships seem over-valued, but they include such names as Flammarion, Rodin, Dumas, Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France (who has written the introduction for her book), and M. Claretie. France describes the dancer as "an American lady with small features, with blue eyes like water in which a pale sky is reflected, rather plump, smiling, refined." He should have added Gallic, for her art—admitting its Greek form—her phrases, her vivacity, her happy egotism are as Gallic as France's description of her. The volume is freely illustrated with photographs of Miss Fuller's dances.
–The American Review of Reviews, Vol. 48 [1913]
