Betty Oliphant’s life is the perfect topic for an autobiography. In 1947 she arrived in Canada from England on the arm of a low-ranking soldier and managed to muster enough funds to set up a small ballet school in her home. Oliphant was already a superb teacher by age 17, and after London, Toronto must have seemed an insipid backwater. Her arrival here came long before Canada even knew it needed her.

By 1959 she was the founding principal of the National Ballet School and a major force in establishing the National Ballet of Canada with founder Celia Franca. Among her students: Karen Kain, Veronica Tennant, Vanessa Harwood, and almost all of our nation’s greatest male dancers including Robert Desrosier and Frank Augustyn.

The potential for Oliphant to deliver some of the best insider information on what makes a premiere ballerina seems endless. But she is surprisingly vague just when you expect her to run circles around the merits of, say, Russian style over her own preference for unmannered perfection. What you get with Oliphant’s memoirs is her chance to put the record straight. Her heart and soul was in teaching dance and with her dancers. Any battles fought, won, and lost, were always self-sacrificing. Oliphant presents herself in a slightly overromanticized light, suggesting she was ambitiously determined but also naive and vulnerable to the exploitations of others. I can’t help but think Oliphant’s copious success was nothing short of ambitious, but with more tooth-and-nail pluck than she gives herself credit for. She has at times adopted the name “dragon lady,” which reveals that there was likely more fire-breathing than she records.

Oliphant devotes a good chunk of the book to her own string of personal tragedies, including her two deadbeat husbands, a difficult mother, and the raising of her two daughters virtually single-handedly. Later, she divulges her painful bouts with depression, which led to various attempts at suicide.

Oddly, the opening of the National Ballet School is breezed over within a single chapter, with very little mention of the difficulties the pipe dream, such as it was, encountered. Oliphant was the idealist who recognized that a ballet school must have equally high standards in the classroom and in the studio. But how did a new school with no reputation and only a fledgling national ballet at the time find 15 students to pay tuition? Oliphant doesn’t deliver. Also, her expertise in turning the well-heeled into philanthropists – Robert Laidlaw the most evident one – is surprisingly vague, which is unfortunate, considering how topical fund raising from the private sector has become.

There is no doubt Oliphant is the powerhouse behind the school’s rocket to success since its opening. A sequel to Miss O: A Life in Dance needs to be added to get the whole picture.