Knight’s Starring Adele Astaire follows the life of Fred’s sister and early dance partner as she navigates her newfound stardom and considers her hopes and dreams beyond the stage. Quick’s What Disappears invents the story of twins, Sonya and Jeannette, separated as infants in an orphanage in Tsarist Russia. Both end up working for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and as their story unfolds, they cross paths with ballet greats such as Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, and Diaghilev himself. Buchanan’s The Painted Girls imagines the lives of Marie van Goethem—famously rendered in Edgar Degas’s statue Little Dancer Aged Fourteen—and her two sisters Antoinette and Charlotte as they rub shoulders with the suspects in an infamous murder trial, work their way up through the Paris Opéra Ballet School, and navigate the underbelly of Paris in the late 1800s. 

Fjord Review spoke with Quick, Knight, and Buchanan about their research processes, turning movement into words, and breathing life into historical figures.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Each of you chose a topic and characters intimately tied to dance. Do you have backgrounds in dance? If not, what drew you to this world? 

Cathy Marie Buchanan: I was very involved in classical ballet growing up. When I decided to write The Painted Girls, I happened upon a television documentary—it was part of a BBC series called The Private Life of a Masterpiece; each episode takes a look at a different masterpiece of art—and the episode that I happened upon was on Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. I think because I’d grown up studying classical ballet—we actually had a bunch of Edgar Degas artworks tacked to the walls in the studio where I did my classes—I was really sucked into this documentary and incredibly interested in the idea that ballet came from a pretty seedy place back in 1880s Paris. 

Eliza Knight: I came across my character Adele Astaire, who's Fred Astaire's sister, when I was doing research for another book, actually. I didn't know that Fred Astaire even had a sister, and when I found out that she was actually his original dance partner and more famous than he was, I was just extremely interested in finding out about her life, and then sharing her life with other people, because she sort of did fade into the background. As far as dancing, I've never been a dancer myself. I dance horribly, but my daughter was a competition dancer, so I was heavily involved with that all the way through her senior year of high school. 

Barbara Quick: This novel was a story that I started when I was 21 years old. At that point, it didn't involve dance at all, it involved a sort of sketch of my own family: my own ancestors in Russia, our Jewish family, who had undergone some real hardship and were trying to survive it, and who emigrated, eventually, to the US. I didn't have the key to the story—I had the main characters. I got some encouragement for this from the fiction editor of the New Yorker at the time, and then I went on to write a completely different first novel. Some 40 years later, I was introduced to a really wonderful archive of art books about the Ballets Russes. I was fascinated and I read that quite a few of the dancers were actually Russian Jews. There were some funny stories about mothers who were traveling with their daughters and trying to protect them—I suddenly made an imaginative leap, and instead of one main character, who was under a streetlamp in the snow in Kishinev with Jascha, the pharmacist’s son, she had a twin. They were placed in an orphanage during a time of hardship, and quite by accident a French family came and adopted one of the baby girls. They meet again as 29-year-old strangers in the doorway of Anna Pavlova’s dressing room in Paris, and they're both working for Diaghilev’s company—one is an extra dancer and one is a seamstress. And meanwhile, I had always been very involved in the world of dance—mostly ethnic dance, I have zero turnout. I did a lot of jazz and modern, and I've performed and paraded in various Brazilian dance troupes. But I know about the discipline of a dancer, and I know what it takes. I also know the emotional doorway it provides out of one's own painful feelings, so I felt very able to identify with my dancer characters.