Geraldine Hoffman was an American who had lived in Paris over forty years, having become an expatriate in 1966 when she was thirty. While she retained a dual citizenship, she’d always thought of herself as a guest in France. She enjoyed the country’s slower pace, a place where people put a value on art and culture. Some might have said she was a snob, but she didn’t agree.
Unmarried, the former principal dancer with the Oregon Ballet Company and later with the Paris Opera Ballet, she’d lived for her art and when, at the age of forty-three, dancing was no longer a joy, when she feared she could no longer attain the perfection she demanded of herself, she left the stage and turned her hand to writing poetry. But living for art didn’t make her an elitist.
To be honest, her writing was of modest quality but she did publish in several journals, and had one slim volume of her works released when she was in her fifties. The book attracted the positive attention of a few critics, but she suspected the praise was more a transfer of allegiance from those who admired her as a dancer than to her skills as a poet. She recognized her talents were limited and, over time, she fell more to reading — a habit which led her to a life of quiet solitude.