Dance Night

This impressive novel, published in 1930, is set in a working-class community in smalltown Ohio in the years immediately before the First World War. The central characters are Jennia St Clair, toughened by an upbringing in an orphanage, and Morris Abbott, whose irascible father is normally absent from home. Neither of them having strong parental models to guide them, they construct their own ambitions to pursue and at the same time look to gain each other’s approval in the absence of a father or mother who will bless them.

The author, Dawn Powell, often gave her birth year as 1897. In fact she was born in Ohio on 28 November 1896 and so I have moved her to that year's section of my reading list. Her own childhood was unsettled and often unhappy and her portrayal of Jennia and her younger sister, Lil, as girls abandoned by their mother, reflects much of her own experience, even though she was never herself in an orphanage. Her mother had died when Dawn was seven years old and she was persecuted by her stepmother. It was only after she fled her father and his second wife to live with an aunt that she began to have confidence in herself as she received encouragement from her guardian to express herself creatively. She graduated from Lake Erie College and began a career as a freelance writer. Dance Night was her third novel and she considered it the best of the 15 that she wrote. Her biographer, Tim Page, has recently tried to give her the acclaim that she did not quite receive during her lifetime: “I don’t like using gender labels but I really do think Powell is our finest woman writer.”

Jen is haunted by loss and dreams of rescuing her younger sister, Lil, from the orphanage and of being able to support her:
“People last such a little while with me. There's no way to keep them, I guess. Everybody goes away — that's why I've got to go back for Lil because I know how terrible it is to be left always — never see people again.”

Beyond that she aspires to being successful as a dancer in one of the big cities. Morry wants to make it in business and be respected in the community but struggles to have enough self-confidence:
“Nobody would ever listen to Morry Abbott — and worse yet he could never in this world get up the nerve to approach them. The snappy young Abbott of his fantasies might calmly tap Hunt on the shoulder and tell him just what was what; but nothing, to the real Morry, was worth the anguish of going to a man and quite out of a blue sky telling him your own private little dream of a lovely place to live.”
At the end of the novel, neither Jen nor Morry have found genuine fulfilment even though they manage to achieve some aspects of their dreams.