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Since virtually the only records that remain of Maud Allan's life at the time of her debut in Vienna in 1903 and her subsequent appearances in various cities of Europe during the next five years are the reviews of her performances, the handful of surviving letters from Maud to her mother, Isabella Durrant of San Francisco are of particular interest. While they do not, either in quantity or in subject matter, provide detailed information about Maud's life, these letters do throw light upon certain aspects of her debut in Vienna, whose reception she had apparently exaggerated considerably in her letters, on her diminishing confidence in her future as a dancer, and on the reaction of her mother and others to her first pursuit of fame. Maud's debut was a source of at least as much astonishment as delight for her mother, for it fulfilled her mother's quasi-mystical faith in Maud's abilities. That joy, however, was gradually tempered by motherly concern and a growing uneasiness that she might be losing the daughter she still, and often, called her "darling baby girl"-Maud was thirty years old at the time of her debut in Viennato the pursuit of mere faddishness. "I dislike the word 'dance,'" she finally confessed in a letter of November 30, 1905; "I wish your work could be called by some other name."

At the end of her fifteen-month tour of the Far East, New Zealand and Australia, Maud Allan sailed from Australia in late January 1915, arriving in San Francisco in late February.1 For about a year she stayed with her parents, who were living in a bungalow on Lucille Avenue, in a seedy part of Hollywood. During the summer of 1915 she played the lead role, which included a number of dances, in a photoplay titled The Rugmaker's Daughter, no copy of which has as yet been discovered. To judge by the extant reviews, this "romance" had few redeeming features, one critic complaining that it was "too much of a melodrama to be a good burlesque, too much of a burlesque to be any sort of drama."2 In all likelihood Maud agreed with the critics because in later years she barely referred to this venture. En route to London in early 1916, Maud had an emergency appendectomy in New York, from which she nearly died. Her parents came to join her during her convalescence and posed for a photograph with her in Central Park. In New York she also met the colorful journalist Frank Harris, who had recently been appointed editor of Pearson's Magazine. One of his "portraits"which was printed in the Musical Courier for April 17, 1916

Ever since Duncanism has created schools with its danced poems and music, scarcely a season passes by without the appearance of a new star in the sky of modern choreography. This season's star is Maud Allan, a first-hand student and apprentice of Duncan, but who now has become a strong rival of her teacher, having appeared with great success in the various capitals of Europe. But Maud Allan's art has nothing to do with what one would call "dancing" in the parlance of the classical ballet. For this young woman is certainly more mime than dancer and is less convincing in the "virtuosity of her whirling legs" than in the forcefulness of her uncommonly refined gesturing. Nevertheless one can have differing opinions about the justification for this particular method of dancing. Sarasate was severely criticized when he played Chopin's E-flat major Nocturne on the violin. But that this nocturne has been set to dance today by Isadora and Maud Allan is not an issue and is little discussed. One can see that the unexpected has more and more success.

Between her closing performance on the stage of London's Palace Theatre in mid-November 1909 and her departure on January 10, 1910, for her maiden tour of the United States, Maud Allan made a two city visit to Russia, dancing in St. Petersburg and Moscow. One of her motives in undertaking such an excursion surely was to match, or even surpass, the success of Isadora Duncan, who, some years earlier, had taken Russia by storm. Shortly before Maud's debut performance in St. Petersburg on December 4 (New Style), the Zuvnal Teatra Literaturino introduced Maud to its readers. Having defined her as one of Isadora Duncan's many "radiant successors," the apparently knowledgeable writer went on to specify Maud's "bright talents"-the least of which, in his view, were her technical accomplishments

Seventy-five years ago, on March 8, 1908, the Canadian-born aesthetic dancer Maud Allan made her sensational London debut featuring "The Vision of Salome" at the Palace Theatre. For nearly two years she was the idol of the popular press, the rage of London's entertainment world, and the toast of British society. For the previous five years she had toured the European continent from Brussels to Belgrade, but she had been hampered by lack of funds and inept management, and though her infrequent performances had attracted critical admiration-including that of England's vacationing King Edward VII-her career had never caught fire. Seven years after her debut in London, Maud Allan was once again struggling for recognition. She regained it one time-but in the form of notoriety that was to remove her permanently from public attention. When she died in Los Angeles in October 1956, the few obituary notices were brief and highly inaccurate. Why? Even to pose such a question is to furnish part of the answer, for Maud Allan was the victim of both her success and her personality. Though not the first to use the Salome story as the basis for a dance production, her version was the most celebrated of the many offered to the public. Yet less than three years after her