Along with Marie Taglioni, the Austrian Fanny Elssler was one of the most celebrated dancers of the Romantic Ballet. Her contemporary, the French writer Theophile Gautier wrote of her in 1838: "It can be emphatically stated that Mlle. Fanny Elssler is the most beautiful of all the women appearing on the stage today...Beneath the amorous languor, the intoxicating sensuality that yields to the heat of passion, and the feminine sweetness and all the gentle fascination of a ballerina, can be sensed the agility, the sudden speed and the steely muscles of a young athlete. Also, Mlle. Elssler appeals to everybody, even to women who cannot endure ballerinas." 

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  The Chevalier Henry Wikoff, a Princetonian, was the impresario who brought Fanny Elssler to America for a two-year tour beginning in 1840.  In her Biographical Dictionary of Dance, the American dance historian Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner writes this:  "Elssler was the only one of the major Romantic ballerinas to reach the United States, or anywhere in the Western Hemisphere; without being overly chauvinistic, this fact must also denote her as unique.  Nineteenth-century America was a prime market for Romanticism in the other arts and media and welcomed Elssler's brand of ballet."