“Dancing Woman” by Elaine Neil Orr

Elaine Neil Orr’s Dancing Woman (Blair, 2025) is a delicately visceral interrogation of what it means to be a woman in search of herself and what it costs when every choice—and every failure to choose—reshapes everything around her. The story is set in the 1960s, in northern Yoruba country, Nigeria, during the years between the region’s independence and first military coup. Orr’s third novel is her most complex portrait of betweenness and becoming to date.

The tale follows Isabel Hammond, a young woman and aspiring artist from Virginia. She accompanies her aid-worker husband to an unfamiliar land in an attempt to forge a life that might offer something for her—and allow her to offer something to those around her, as well. A highly imperfect and unapologetically human character, Isabel’s future unfurls at rapid pace when she first spends a night away from her husband and next discovers an ancient artifact called a Nok buried in her yard. She clings desperately to the terracotta figure of the dancing woman as the village chief assigns her to discern its meaning. Partly a portrait in becoming, the novel is an aching search for purpose and belonging. The delicate layers and angles of Dancing Woman offer a multifaceted examination of the limits and complexities of women’s agencies and desires and the ever-human quest for purpose and peace.

With words only an artist can possibly conjure, Orr paints northern Nigeria with reverence, intimacy, and just enough distance for the reader to feel the vibrant texture of the Muslim-dominated territory of Kaduna State. Though Orr was born in southwestern Nigeria among the Yoruba, Dancing Woman takes place primarily in the northern region, in the village of Kufana. Since the author comes to the American South by way of West Africa, it is likely the author’s own duality gives Isabel such complexity. Beyond cultural differences in perspective, this textural mashup breathes throughout Orr’s novel, as in this description of Kaduna:

“Peugeots and Volkswagens, and a few Fords and Chevrolets, already filled the parking lot as Isabel and the Van Dijks pulled up to the red-roofed guesthouse…at the back of a wide yard surrounded by willowy casuarina trees. A few stray chickens wandered about the lawn. Down the street were the Kaduna swimming pool and Gamji Park, a shady corridor of towering kapok trees, destination for expats and well-to-do Nigerians alike. The Kaduna River flowed nearby. River of crocodiles, for Kaduna meant crocodiles, though Isabel had yet to see one.”

The vibrancy and raw physicality of place is so naturally enmeshed throughout the novel, the setting is truly a living place.

This speaks to the protagonist, Isabel, as well, who both seeks refuge within and purpose from her surroundings. She is not the single-stroke white wife of an aid worker. She is layered, contradictory, and grows in complexity as the story moves. Isabel is terribly impulsive and also often self-aware. When she spends a night with the Yoruba musician Bobby Tunde, the aftermath reverberates both through Isabel and the chapters that follow. Tunde carries much allure. He is partly a reflection of his homeland as well as an artist. And while Isabel herself is spiritually drawn to Nigeria, Orr never crosses into romanticized or exoticized territory without reason. In fact, Orr masterfully pokes at Isabel and her sometimes naïve romanticism, balancing elevated reverie with the mundane:

“Suddenly a camel came through the large gate…They had to walk around a large mud puddle in the road. The murky edge lay clotted with trash and interfered with Isabel’s sense of spiritual illumination.”

The characters surrounding Isabel range from other aid-worker wives, local medicine women, marketplace vendors, the village chief and of course, an easy favorite—Daniel, who’s the Tiv house manager for Isabel’s home. They create a productive dynamism and friction as the story progresses. When Isabel attempts to meddle too far in others affairs in an attempt “save” some local girls from what she assumes to be their future fates, Daniel asks her, “Are we toys to you?” It is this sensitivity and awareness, alongside Isabel’s imperfections, that rescue the novel from dipping into white savior territory and offers something more genuinely multifaceted instead: a portrait of a woman attempting to reckon with the limits of her own self-understanding and goodness. As Isabel herself notes: “Perfect beauty was never so enchanting as imperfect.” This novel is an unflinching yet tender meditation on the co-existence of imperfection and grace.

As a reader, you get the sense that nothing will quite satisfy Isabel. And perhaps that is the point. Isabel searches for purpose, fulfillment, and freedom throughout the novel—but it’s a moving target. When her work—and therefore her identity as an artist—is first criticized by a visiting artist at her university, she jumps at the opportunity to accompany her husband to Nigeria. When no immediate story or purpose becomes her upon moving, she chases it through motherhood, through love, through her landscape, and through her art. Each goal promises freedom and purpose until the goal is achieved or the act complete, and then Isabel is left searching all over again.

And Isabel isn’t the only thing unraveling. Set in the 1960s, Nigeria’s unrest grows throughout the novel. Daniel’s homeland is overrun by soldiers and the expat community moves closer to evacuation. The region’s fracturing, in combination with the shattering of Isabel’s inner world, creates urgency and unrest both internally and externally. And though we sense that Isabel gains some sense of wholeness or fulfillment through the sharing art by the end of the novel, she is ultimately meant to return to the States, where the hero will return no doubt changed. Very likely, she will never feel completely at home again.

Dancing Woman could perhaps be seen equally as a celebratory and as a cautionary tale. It contemplates the costs of being human and being woman: in choosing to live and love, to want and to create. It is a meditation on spirituality and change and multiplicity. The prose holds immense depth, nearly bursting on the page. Both lush and masterful, each scene is so purposefully chosen that it successfully carries the weight of so much character and thematic work while still maintaining an engaging plot.

Not to be overlooked, Dancing Woman is an incredibly intimate book that invites the reader into Isabel’s life at its most private. Each moment is rendered with such care that the prose feels decadent without tipping into self-indulgence.

Orr has previously acknowledged in an interview that the novel is partly a response to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which assigns two women—a mother and a painter—as counterpoints to one another. Dancing Woman asks instead: Why not both? It holds the frictions and beauty of that question throughout, acknowledging the fractures as an integral part of attempting to hold multiple selves in one whole. Dancing Woman is a complex and compassionate novel that will transport you in the most aching and delicious of ways.

Elaine Neil Orr

The daughter of missionary parents, Elaine Neil Orr was born and grew up among the forests and rivers of southwestern Nigeria. She comes to the American South by way of that other South in West Africa. The author of six books, including the memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life and the novels A Different Sun and Swimming Between Worlds, she is a professor of English at North Carolina State University and serves on the faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.